
Class B 74 _ 

Book: 

&EvriglitK _______L. 

CJQBCRIGJIT LEPOSn. 



RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 



RECONSTRUCTION IN 
PHILOSOPHY 



BY 
JOHN DEWEY 

Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University 




, 



NEW YORK. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1920 



1&k 



CoPTRIOHT, 1920, 
BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



SEP 30 1920 




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tEbe <&u(nn & Sobtn Companp 

BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
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INDEX 



INDEX 



Absolute reality, 23, 27 

Absolutism, 97, 190; Kant 
and, 99 

Abstract definition, 20 

Abstractions, 149-150, 174 

Absurdities, 10 

Achievements, 194 

Action, kind of> 80 

Adult life, 185, 186 

America, 41 

Amoeba, 91 

Animals, dramatisation in 
primitive life of man, 4 

Antiquity, 33 

Apprehension, 142 

Aquinas, 55, 106 

Argumentation, 31, 132 

Aristotle, 13, 17, 19, 55 ; Bacon's 
charge against, 30-31, 36; 
distinction in ends, 171; ex- 
perience, 79, 80; forms, 105; 
on change, 107; on philosophy 
as contemplation, 109, 110; 
on slavery, 191; theory of the 
state, 44; ultimate reality, 106 

Art, 34, 103, 211, 212 

Artisan, 15; knowledge, 110 

Associations, 205 ; voluntary, 
203 

Astronomers, 65 t 113 

Astronomy, 75 

Athenians, 13, 19 

Augustine, St., Ill 

Authority, 48, 139, 195; final, 
161; seat of, 160. See also 
Final good 

Bacon, Francis, 28, 81, 97; 
criticism of the learning of 



his day, 29-30; experience, 97- 
98; "knowledge is power," 
29; summary of ideas, 29 

Being, perfect, 111 

Being and non-being, 107 

Beliefs and facts, 12 

Bentham, 166, 182, 188 

Bergson, 71 

Berkeley, 50 

Biology, 75, 84 

Bliss, 111, 112 

Bosanquet, 134 

Bradley, 107 

Bruno, 66 

Business, 41, 43, 183 

Butler, Bishop, 21 

Capital, 43 

Capital and labour, 191 

Capitalism, 41, 182 

Castes, material, 59 

Casuistry, 166 

Causation, 63 

Causes, 59, 60 

Certainty, 21, 22 

Change, ancient idea of, 57; 
existing view, 113; law of the 
universe, 61; Plato and Aris- 
totle on, 107; progress and, 
116 

Chemistry, 75 

Child life, 91-92, 184 

Christian mediaeval philosophy, 
17, 19 

Christian theology, 111 

Church, 47; universal, 45 

Classes, 75, 152, 155; in the 
ancient conception of the 
world, 59 



217 



218 



INDEX 



Classic conception of philoso- 
phy, 17, 22, 24, 74, 105 

Classification, 152, 169 

Common sense, 100 

Communication at a distance, 
118, 120 

Comte, Auguste, 10 

Conceptions, 81, 144, 145; re- 
construction in, moral, 161; 
truth, 156 

Concrete cases, in morals, 161; 
in social philosophy, 188 

Concreteness, 150 

Condillac, 81 

Conduct, 80; right course, 163 

Conflict, 108, 138, 140; of ends, 
166 

Conscience, 46 

Consequences, investigating, 

163-164 

Conservatism, 18, 33, 40, 100 

Constant, 61 

Contemplation, 109, 111 

Contract theory of the state, 
45 

Control, 42, 64 

Co-operation in research, 37 

Cosmogonies and cosmologies, 9 

Cosmology, 70, 75 

Craftsmen, 12, 13 

Criteria, 77 

Crusades, 39 

Cults, 8; consolidation, 9 

Custom, 17, 161 

Dante, 55 

Darwin, 75 

Deduction, 148 

Delusions, 139 

Democracy, 47, 186, 206; of 
facts, 66; significance, 209 

Demonstration, 20, 21, 31; dis- 
covery vs., 32 

Descartes, 50 

Desires, 110, 111; frustration, 
104 

Details, 141 



Development, Aristotle's use of 
term, 57, 58 

Diagnosis, 142 

Direction, 176 

Disagreeable, 103 

Discipline, 103, 104, 184 

Discord, 108 

Discovery, contacts of 16th and 
17th centuries, 39; demon- 
stration vs., 32; logic of, 31, 
33; moral, 174 

Distance, 118-119, 120 

Doctrines, 8; consolidation, 9 

Dogma, 145, 159 

Dreams, 119, 120, 139; world of, 7 

Dualism, 173 

Duties and rights, 207 

Earth, ancient conception, 55; 
relation to universe, 66 

Economic ends, 171-172 

Education, 125, 183, 209 

Efficient cause, 59, 60 

Emotion, 103, 210 

Empirical and rational, 81, 87 

Empiricists, 78, 82 

Ends, conflicting, 166; fixed, 70; 
intrinsic and instrumental, 
170, 172-173; means and, 72- 
73; values, 175 

English empiricism, 99 

Environment, 10; life and, 84 

Epistemology, 49, 70, 123, 126 

Errors, 35 

Esthetic and practical, 66 

Estheticism, 115-116, 117, 180; 
science and, reconciling, 127 

Ether, 55, 56 

Ethical theory, 161 

Europe, nationalistic movement, 
201; social cause of intellec- 
tual revolution in 16th and 
17th centuries, 38-39 

Evil, problem of, 177 

Evolution, in Aristotle, 58; of 
the state, 200-201 

Existence, two realms, 22 



INDEX 



219 



Experience, 32; as a guide in 
science and moral life, 78 
basis of old notion of, 79 
changed conceptions, 77 
classic notion and modern, 
81; combined doing and suf- 
fering, 86; evil result of un- 
imaginative conception of, 
100-101; Greek, 79; modern 
appeal to, 48; new conception, 
83; Plato, 92; principles and, 
48; self-regulative, 94-95; 
true " stuff " of^ 91 

Experimental method, 13 

Experimentation, 42 

Exploration, 39, 40 



Facing facts, 140, 141, 143 

Facts, 10, 98 

Falsity, 158 

Family principle, 189; in the 
world at large, 61-62 

Fanaticism, 168 

Fancy. See Imagination 

Fear, 40 

Feudalism, 43, 45; of the uni- 
verse in ancient conception, 
59, 61-62 

Fighting, 15 

Final cause, 59, 60, 68 

Final good, 161-162, 183; exist- 
ence of a single good ques- 
tioned, 162 

Fine arts, 126 

Finite, 107 

Finite and infinite, 66 

Fire, 11, 56, 86 

Fixed ends, 165 

Flux, 57, 108 

Formal cause, 59, 60 

Forms of Aristotle, 105 

Free will, 196 

Freedom, law and, 207; re- 
ligious, 46 

Future, 48 

Future aim of philosophy, 26 



General notions, in morals, 161 ; 
in social philosophy, 188 

Generalities, 174; social affairs 
and, 198 

Generalisations, 10, 151 

Geology, 75 

German political philosophv, 
200, 208-209 

German rationalism, 99 

Germans, system, order, docil- 
ity, 98-99 

Germany, 19 

God, 10, 109 

Golden Age, 48 

Good. See Final good 

Goodness, 179 

Greeks, 9, 13, 19, 66, 67, 126; 
ethical theory, 161; religion, 
105; science and arts, 93 

Growth, 184; of knowledge, 31; 
moral, 177 

Happiness, 179 

Healthy living, 166, 167, 177 

Heavens, ancient conception, 
56 

Hegel, 19, 106, 189, 190; con- 
ception of the state, 200, 201 ; 
logic, 134 

Helvetius, 81 

Hierarchical order, 59 

"Higher" ends, 172 

Hindoos, 126 

History, Hegel's conception, 
201 

History of philosophy, 25 

Hobbes, 88, 188 

Homo faber, 71 

Human aims, 42, 43 

Human life, "real" and 
"ideal," a live issue, 128 

Humanism and naturalism, 174 

Humanitv, 206 

Hume, 50, 83, 89 

Hypotheses, 22, 145 

Hysteria, 139 

Ideal, changed conceptions, 103; 



220 



INDEX 



problem of relation to the 
real, 130; real and, a human 
issue, 128 

Ideal realm, classic and modern 
conceptions contrasted, 118 

Idealism, 129; epistemological, 
49, 51; theological, 50; tragic 
kind, 129-130 

Ideality, one with reality, 111; 
philosophic conception, 106 

Ideas of Plato, 105 

Idols, 36 

Ills, 169; philosophy and, 177- 
178 

Imagination, 211; empirical 
knowledge and, 73, 74; re- 
shaping power, 103, 106 

Independence, 110; social, 185 

India, 41 

Individual, 36, 45, 51; concept 
as something given, 193; in 
social and moral sense, 194; 
social and, 199; state and, 
190, 191 

Individualism, 50; political, 45, 
46; religious, 46; religious 
and moral, 46 

Induction, 34 

Industrial revolution and scien- 
tific revolution, 38, 41 

Industry, movements, 47; 
science and, 38, 41, 42 

Infinite, 66, 67 

Initiative 46, 209 

Innate ideas, 35, 82 

Inquiry, 174; free, 146; impar- 
tial, 147; methods in moral 
ills, 170 

Insinceritv, 20 

Instability, 107 

Institutions, 196; true starting- 
points of inquiry about, 197 

Instrumental ends, 171 

Intellect, 6 

Intellectual somnambulism, 140 

Intellectualism, 117 

Intelligence, 36, 51; as inquiry 



into consequences, 163-164; 

definition, 96 
Interest, 194-195 
International interests, 204, 205 
Intrinsic good, 170, 206 
Introspection, 196 
Invention, 39, 42, 49, 122 
Investigation, 147 
Ipse dixit method, 166 
Irresponsibility, 97 

James, William, 21; Pragma- 
tism, 38 

Judea, 9 

Judgment, 133; moral, 176; 
standards, 175 

Kant, 50, 83, 98, 206; his philoso- 
phv and German character, 
93 : 99 

Kinship, 62 

Knowledge, conception as be- 
holding, 115; degrees, 108; 
empirical as organ of imagi- 
nation, 73, 74; existing prac- 
tice, 112; modern view of 
right way to get it, 113; posi- 
tive, 12; positive vs. tradition, 
16; practical and operative, 
121, 122; sensations and, 87, 
88, 89; spectator conception, 
112, 117 

" Knowledge is power," 29, 42, 51 

Law, 61, 64; freedom and, 207; 
reason and, 98. See also Final 
good 

Learning, Bacon's three kinds, 
29 

Licentiousness, 163 

Life, 167, 211; environment and, 
84-85 

Literary culture, 39 

Locke, 35, 50, 81, 89, 152; 
philosophic empiricism, 82 

Logic, a science and an art, 
135; apparatus, 20, 21; char- 
acter, 132, 134; importance, 



INDEX 



221 



138; in morals and politics, 
138; inconsistencies, 134; new, 
36; of discovery, 33; of dis- 
covery vs. that of' argumen- 
tation, 31; theory, chaotic 
state, 133 

Logical system, 9 

Lotze, 134 

Making a living, 211 
Man, perfectibility, 49; primi- 
tive, 4, 5 ; savage and civilized, 

85; tool-maker, 71 
Marcus Aurelius, 106 
Materialism, 50, 70, 73, 171, 182 
Mathematics, 137, 149 
Matter, 72, 211 
Means and ends, 72-73 
Mechanics, 67, 69; Greeks and, 

67 
Mechanism, 211 

Mechanisation of nature, 71-72 
Mediaeval Christianity, 17, 19, 

126 
Meliorism, 178 
Memory, 1, 6, 103; emotional 

character, 2; individual and 

group, 8; primitive, 3 
Metaphysics, 17, 124, 126 
Methods, 149; social philosophy, 

193; true, 32 
Middle Ages, 47, 64, 132 
Military art, 15 
Mill, J.' S., 132 
Mind, pure, 111 
Miracles, 125 
Mistakes, 175 
Modern thought, 52; Bacon as 

founder, 28; early, 49, 50. 

See also Thought 
Mohammedans, 39 
Moral ends, 169 
Moral life, 165 
Moral science. See under 

Science 
Morality, pragmatic rule, 163; 

standard of judgment, 176 



Morals, 126, 169; politics and, 
197 

National state, 200; end or in- 
strument, 202-203; role of 
the modern, 201 

Nationalistic movement, 201 

Natural Science. See under 
Science 

Naturalism and humanism, 174 

Nature, contrast of ancient and 
modern conceptions, 53-54 ; 
inquiry into, 32, 37, 48, 49; 
loss of poetry when consid- 
ered as mechanism, 69; pro- 
found change in man's atti- 
tude to, 115; value of 
mechanisation, 71-72; web im- 
posed on, 35-36 

Neglect, 97 

Neo-Platonism, 111 

New World, 39 

Non-being, 107 

Noumenal reality, 23 

Nous, 36 

Obliviscence of the disagree- 
able, 103 

Observation, 140 

Optimism, 178 

Opportunity, 211 

Organic society, 187 

Organisms, 86 

Organisation, 206-207 

Oriental nations, 127 

Origin of philosophies, 5, 18, 24 3 
25 



Pantheon, Greek, 105 
Past, 212 

Perfectibility of mankind, 49 
Perfection, 177 
Personality, 47, 189, 209 
Persuasion, 31 
Pessimism, 178 
Phariseeism, 176 



222 



INDEX 



Phenomenal reality, 23 

Philosophy, emancipation, 123; 
function, 111, 122; future aim 
and scope, 26; hard and fast 
alternatives of English and 
German schools, 99-100; his- 
tory, 25; opportunities, 49; 
origin, 5, 18, 24, 25; practical 
nature, 121; proper province, 
24, 124 work, 18 

Physician, 168 

Physics, 75 

Plato, 13, 14, 17, 19, 188, 205; 
dramatic sense, 15; experi- 
ence, 79, 92; ideas, ideal 
realm, 105; on change, 107; 
social arts, 94; ultimate real- 
ity, 106 

Pleasure, 181 

Plotinus, 106 

Pluralism, 204 

Poetry, 7, 8, 103, 212 

Political changes, 43 

Political organisation, 44 

Politics, 125; morals and, 197; 
movements, 47 

Possession of knowledge, 31 

Potentiality, Aristotle's use of 
term, 57, 58 

Practical and esthetic, 66 

Pragmatism, 38 

Pretensions, 21 

Primitive man, 4 

Principles, 81, 163; criteria of 
experience, 48 

Probability, 21 

Production, 181 

Progress, 42, 48, 116, 211: 
Bacon and, 32, 34; economic 
and moral, contrast, 125 

Proof, 20 

Property, 182, 189 

Protestantism, 46 

Proudhon, 189 

Prussian State, 190, 201 

Psychology, 83, 135; change in, 
84; malicious, 82 



Pure reason, 78 

Questioning, 17. 
quiry 



also In- 



Radicalism, 18, 19, 100 

Rank, 63 

Rationalism, 97; rigidity, 98 

Rationalists, 87, 88, 89 

Rationalisation, 97, 102 

Real, changed conceptions, 103; 
ideal and, a human issue, 128; 
problem of relation to the 
ideal, 130 

Reality, 23, 27; classic concep- 
tion, 105; nomenal vs. phe- 
nomenal, 23; ultimate, 108; 
ultimate, one with ideality, 
111 

Reason, 83, 174; as a faculty 
separate from experience, 95; 
as re-adjusting intelligence, 
96; changed conceptions, 77 

Reasoning, 32 

Reconstruction of philosophy, 
52; essential, 51; historical 
factors, 28; in moral concep- 
tions, 161; scientific factor, 
53; social philosophy and, 
187; specific present problem, 
43; value of a solution of 
the dilemma of reason and 
experience, 101 

Re-creation, 51, 180 

Reform, 179, 180; starting- 
point, 196 

Relativity of sensations, 88 

Religion, 103, 211, 212; move- 
ments, 47 

Religious freedom, 46 

Religious spirit, 210 

Renaissance, 29 

Research, 42 ; co-operative, 
37 

Responsibility, 163 

Revolution of thought, 60 

Rights and duties, 207 



INDEX 



223 



Rome, 9 

Ruler and subject, 44; in 
nature, 64 

Rules of conduct, 165 

Sailors, 11 

Salvation, 112 

Santayana, George, on Locke, 
82 

Satisfaction, 157 

Savage, 85, 176 

Scholasticism, 30 

Science, 14, 23; advance in, 53; 
co-operative pursuit, 37 ; 
estheticism and, reconciling, 
127; human value, 173; indus- 
try and, 38, 41, 42; natural, 
42, 48; open world of, 61; 
origin, 12; picture of uni- 
verse, 64-65; relation to ex- 
perience, 95; separation of 
natural and moral, 173; so- 
called, 36; traditional, 30 

Scientific revolution, 53 

Self-delusion, 140 

Self-interest, 194-195 

Sensations, 84; as points of re- 
adjustment, 89; relativity, 88 

Senses, 84, 87 

Sentimentalism, 73 

Shakespeare, 94 

Slavery, 191 

Social belief, 26 

Social development, 43 

Social evils, 182. See also Ills 

Social philosophy, reconstruc- 
tion, 187; reconstructive im- 
pact, 193 

Social unit, real, 204 

Social welfare, 180 

Sociality, 185 

Society, 200, 205; defect of 
usual theories about, 188; in- 
dividuals and, three views, 
187-188; philosophy and, 124 

Socrates, 14, 17 

Soldiers, 139 

Sophists, 13, 14 



Space, 118-119, 120 

Spinoza, 106 

Standards, 175 

State, Aristotle's theory, 44; 
contract theory, 45; current 
conception, 200 ; importance, 
204; individual and, 190, 191; 
modern, 44; origin, 44; su- 
premacy, 202, 203 

Subject and ruler, 44; in nature, 
64 

Success, 179 

Suggestions, 3, 6, 7 

Summum Conum. See Final 
good 

Supernaturalism, 47 

System, 98, 99 

Telegraph, 120 

Telephone, 120 

Terminology, 21 

Theories, 144, 145; validity, 
156 

Theory and practice, 140 

Things as they are, 115 

Thinking, habits, 74, 75. See 
also Thought 

Thomas, St. See Aquinas. 

Thought, 117; good and bad 
thinking, 136; instrumental 
nature, 145-146; its origin in 
difficulties, 138-139; kinds, 
135; logic and, 134; place, 
96; systems, 145 

Tolerance, 46 

Tradition, 14; positive knowl- 
edge vs., 16 

Transitoriousness, 106 

Travel, 39, 40 

Trouble, 138, 140 

Truth, as utility, 157; defining, 
159-160; logical conception, 
156-157; old and new, 33, 34; 
pragmatic conception, 156, 
159; test of, nature of, 155, 
166; why the modern concep- 
tion is offensive, 157, 158 



224 INDEX 

Unity, 108 War, 204 

Universal, 64 War, world, lesson, 129; na- 

Universe, closed conception, 54 tionalistic phase, 201 ; " real " 

Utilitarianism, defects, 181; and "ideal" in, 128 

merit, 180; need of recon- Wealth, 40, 42, 125 

struction, 183 Wind, 11 

Utility, 157 Work, 181 

Workingmen, 139 
World, closed and open con- 
Valves, 15 ceptions, 54, 60-61; modern 
Verification, 156 conception as material for 
Virtues, 164 change, 114; nomenal and 
Vision, 21 phenomenal, 23 



PREFATORY NOTE 

Being invited to lecture at the Imperial University 
of Japan in Tokyo during February and March of the 
present year, I attempted an interpretation of the recon- 
struction of ideas and ways of thought now going on in 
philosophy. While the lectures cannot avoid revealing 
the marks of the particular standpoint of their author, 
the aim is to exhibit the general contrasts between older 
and newer types of philosophic problems rather than to 
make a partisan plea in behalf of any one specific solu- 
tion of these problems. I have tried for the most part 
to set forth the forces which make intellectual recon- 
struction inevitable and to prefigure some of the lines 
upon which it must proceed. 

Any one who has enjoyed the unique hospitality of 
Japan will be overwhelmed with confusion if he en- 
deavors to make an acknowledgment in any way com- 
mensurate to the kindnesses he received. Yet I must 
set down in the barest of black and white my grateful 
appreciation of them, and in particular record my inef- 
faceable impressions of the courtesy and help of the 
members of the department of philosophy of Tokyo 
University, and of my dear friends Dr. Ono and Dr. 
Nitobe. J. D. 

September, 1919. 



CONTENTS 

HAPTER PAGE 

I Changing Conceptions of Philosophy .... 1 
Origin of philosophy in desire and imagination. 
Influence of community traditions and authority. 
Simultaneous development of matter-of-fact knowl- 
edge. Incongruity and conflict of the two types. 
Respective values of each type. . . . Classic philos- 
ophies (i) compensatory, (ii) dialectically formal, 
and (iii) concerned with "superior" Reality. Con- 
temporary thinking accepts primacy of matter-of- 
fact knowledge and assigns to philosophy a social 
function rather than that of absolute knowledge. 

II Some Historical Factors in Philosophical Recon- 
struction 28 

Francis Bacon exemplifies the newer spirit. . . . 
He conceived knowledge as power. As dependent 
upon organized cooperative research. ... As tested 
by promotion of social progress. The new thought 
reflected actual social changes, industrial, political, 
religious. . . . The new idealism. 

III The Scientific Factor in Reconstruction of Phi- 

losophy 53 

Science has revolutionized our conception of Na- 
ture. Philosophy has to be transformed because 
no longer depending upon a science which accepts 
a closed, finite world. Or, fixed species. Or, su- 
periority or rest to change and motion. Contrast 
of feudal with democratic conceptions. Elimination 
of final causes. Mechanical science and the possi- 
bility of control of nature. Respect for matter. 
New temper of imagination. Influence thus far 
technical rather than human and moral. 

IV Changed Conceptions of Experience and Reason . 77 

Traditional conception of nature of experience. 
Limits of ancient civilization. Effect of classsic 
idea on modern empiricism. Why a different con- 
ception is now possible. Psychological change em- 

V 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

phasizes vital factor using environment. Effect 
upon traditional ideas of sensation and knowledge. 
Factor of organization. Socially, experience is now 
more inventive and regulative. . . . Corresponding 
change in idea of Reason. Intelligence is hypo- 
thetical and inventive. Weakness of historic Ra- 
tionalism. Kantianism. Contrast of German and 
British philosophies. Reconstruction of empirical 
liberalism. 

V Changed Conceptions of the Ideal and the Real . 103 
Idealization rooted in aversion to the disagree- 
able. . . . This fact has affected philosophy. . . . 
True reality is ideal, and hence changeless, com- 
plete. Hence contemplative knowledge is higher 
than experimental. Contrast with the modern prac- 
tise of knowledge. . . . Significance of change. . . . 
The actual or realistic signifies conditions effect- 
ing change. . . . Ideals become methods rather than 
goals. Illustration from elimination of distance. 
Change in conception of philosophy. . . . The 
significant problems for philosophy. . . . Social 
understanding and conciliation. The practical prob- 
lem of real and ideal. 

VI The Significance of Logical Reconstruction . . 132 
Present confusion as to logic. Logic is regulative 
and normative because empirical. Illustration from 
mathematics. Origin of thinking in conflicts. Con- 
frontation with fact. Response by anticipation or 
prediction. Importance of hypotheses. Impartial 
inquiry. Importance of deductive function. Or- 
ganization and classification. Nature of truth. 
Truth is adverbial, not a thing. 

VII Reconstruction in Moral Conceptions . . . 161 
Common factor in traditional theories. Every 
moral situation unique. Supremacy of the specific 
or individualized case. Fallacy of general ends. 
Worth of generalization of ends and rules is in- 
tellectual. Harmfulness of division of goods into 
intrinsic and instrumental. Into natural and moral. 
Moral worth of natural science. Importance of 
discovery in morals. Abolishing Phariseeism. . . . 
Growth as the end. Optimism and pessimism. Con- 
ception of happiness. Criticism of utilitarianism. 
All life moral in so far as educative. 



CONTENTS vii 

CHAPTER PAGE 

VIII Reconstruction as Affecting Social Philosophy . 187 
Defects of current logic of social thought. Neg- 
lect of specific situations. Defects of organic con- 
cept of society. Evils of notion of fixed self or 
individual. Doctrine of interests. Moral and in- 
stitutional reform. Moral test of social institu- 
tions. Social pluralism. Political monism, dogma 
of National State. Primacy of associations. In- 
ternational humanism. Organization a subordinate 
conception. Freedom and democracy. Intellectual 
reconstruction when habitual will affect imagination 
and hence poetry and religion. 

Index 217 



RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER I 

CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Man differs from the lower animals because he pre- 
serves his past experiences. What happened in the past 
is lived again in memory. About what goes on today 
hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things 
undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an ex- 
perience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or 
suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where 
each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences 
of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder 
of other things. Hence he lives not, like the beasts of 
the field, in a world of merely physical things but in a 
world of signs and symbols. A stone is not merely 
hard, a thing into which one bumps ; but it is a monu- 
ment of a deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely 
something which warms or burns, but is a symbol of the 
enduring life of the household, of the abiding source of 
cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns 
from his casual wanderings. Instead of being a quick 
fork of fire which may sting and hurt, it is the hearth 
at which one worships and for which one fights. And all 
this which marks the difference between bestiality and 

1 



2 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

humanity, between culture and merely physical nature, 
is because man remembers, preserving and recording his 
experiences. 

The revivals of memory are, however, rarely literal. 
We naturally remember what interests us and because it 
interests us. The past is recalled not because of itself 
but because of what it adds to the present. Thus the 
primary life of memory is emotional rather than intel- 
lectual and practical. Savage man recalled yesterday's 
struggle with an animal not in order to study in a scien- 
tific way the qualities of the animal or for the sake of 
calculating how better to fight tomorrow, but to escape 
from the tedium of today by regaining the thrill of 
yesterday. The memory has all the excitement of ihe 
combat without its danger and anxiety. To revive it 
and revel in it is to enhance the present moment with a 
new meaning, a meaning different from that which actu- 
ally belongs either to it or to the past. Memory is 
vicarious experience in which there is all the emotional 
values of actual experience without its strains, vicissi- 
tudes and troubles. The triumph of battle is even more 
poignant in the memorial war dance than at the moment 
of victory ; the conscious and truly human experience of 
the chase comes when it is talked over and re-enacted 
by the camp fire. At the time, attention is taken up 
with practical details and with the strain of uncertainty. 
Only later do the details compose into a story and fuse! 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 3 

into a whole of meaning. At the time of practical 
experience man exists from moment to moment, pre- 
occupied with the task of the moment. As he re- 
surveys all the moments in thought, a drama emerges 
with a beginning, a middle and a movement toward 
the climax of achievement or defeat. 

Since man revives his past experience because of the 
interest added to what would otherwise be the emptiness 
of present leisure, the primitive life of memory is one 
of fancy and imagination, rather than of accurate recol- 
lection. After all, it is the story, the drama, which 
counts. Only those incidents are selected which have 
a present emotional value, to intensify the present tale 
as it is rehearsed in imagination or told to an admiring 
listener. What does not add to the thrill of combat or 
contribute to the goal of success or failure is dropped. 
Incidents are rearranged till they fit into the temper of 
the tale. Thus early man when left to himself, when 
not actually engaged in the struggle for existence, lived 
in a world of memories which was a world of suggestions. 
A suggestion differs from a recollection in that no 1 
attempt is made to test its correctness. Its correctness 
is a matter of relative indifference. The cloud suggests 
a camel or a man's face. It could not suggest these 
things unless some time there had been an actual, literal 
experience of camel and face. But the real likeness is 
of no account. The main thing is the emotional interest 



4 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

in tracing the camel or following the fortunes of the 
face as it forms and dissolves. 

Students of the primitive history of mankind tell of 
the enormous part played by animal tales, myths and 
cults. Sometimes a mystery is made out of this histori- 
cal fact, as if it indicated that primitive man was moved 
by a different psychology from that which now animates 
humanity. But the explanation is, I think, simple. 
Until agriculture and the higher industrial arts were 
developed, long periods of empty leisure alternated with 
comparatively short periods of energy put forth to 
secure food or safety from attack. Because of our own 
habits, we tend to think of people as busy or occupied, 
if not with doing at least with thinking and planning. 
But then men were busy only when engaged in the hunt 
or fishing or fighting expedition. Yet the mind when 
awake must have some filling; it cannot remain literally 
vacant because the body is idle. And what thoughts 
should crowd into the human mind except experiences 
with animals, experiences transformed under the 
influence of dramatic interest to make more vivid and 
coherent the events typical of the chase? As men in 
fancy dramatically re-lived the interesting parts of their 
actual lives, animals inevitably became themselves dram- 
atized. 

They were true dramatis persona? and as such as- 
sumed the traits of persons. They too had desires, 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 5 

hopes and fears, a life of affections, loves and hates, 
triumphs and defeats. Moreover, since they were essen- 
tial to the support of the community, their activities 
and sufferings made them, in the imagination which 
dramatically revived the past, true sharers in the life 
of the community. Although they were hunted, yet they 
permitted themselves after all to be caught, and hence 
they were friends and allies. They devoted themselves, 
quite literally, to the sustenance and well-being of the 
community group to which they belonged. Thus were 
produced not merely the multitude of tales and legends 
dwelling affectionately upon the activities and features 
of animals, but also those elaborate rites and cults which 
made animals ancestors, heroes, tribal figure-heads and 
divinities. 

I hope that I do not seem to you to have gone too 
far afield from my topic, the origin of philosophies. 
For it seems to me that the historic source of phi- 
losophies cannot be understood except as we dwell, at 
even greater length and in more detail, upon such con- 
siderations as these. We need to recognize that the 
ordinary consciousness of the ordinary man left to 
himself is a creature of desires rather than of intel- 
lectual study, inquiry or speculation. Man ceases to 
be primarily actuated by hopes and fears, loves and 
hates, only when he is subjected to a discipline which 
is foreign to human nature, which is, from the stand- 



6 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

point of natural man, artificial. Naturally our books, 
our scientific and philosophical books, are written 
by men who have subjected themselves in a superior 
degree to intellectual discipline and culture. Their 
thoughts are habitually reasonable. They have learned 
to check their fancies by facts, and to organize their 
ideas logically rather than emotionally and dramati- 
cally. When they do indulge in reverie and day-dream- 
ing — which is probably more of the time than is con- 
ventionally acknowledged — they are aware of what they 
are doing. They label these excursions, and do not con- 
fuse their results with objective experiences. We tend 
to judge others by ourselves, and because scientific and 
philosophic books are composed by men in whom the 
reasonable, logical and objective habit of mind predomi- 
nates, a similar rationality has been attributed by them 
to the average and ordinary man. It is then overlooked 
that both rationality and irrationality are largely 
irrelevant and episodical in undisciplined human nature ; 
that men are governed by memory rather than by 
thought, and that memory is not a remembering of 
actual facts, but is association, suggestion, dramatic 
fancy. The standard used to measure the value of the 
suggestions that spring up in the mind is not congruity 
with fact but emotional congeniality. Do they stimu- 
late and reinforce feeling, and fit into the dramatic tale? 
Are they consonant with the prevailing mood, and can 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 7 

they be rendered into the traditional hopes and fears 
of the community? If we are willing to take the word 
dreams with a certain liberality, it is hardly too much 
to say that man, save in his occasional times of actual 
work and struggle, lives in a world of dreams, rather 
than of facts, and a world of dreams that is organized 
about desires whose success and frustration form its 
stuff. 

To treat the early beliefs and traditions of mankind 
as if they were attempts at scientific explanation of the 
world, only erroneous and absurd attempts, is thus to 
be guilty of a great mistake. The material out of 
which philosophy finally emerges is irrelevant to science 
and to explanation. It is figurative, symbolic of fears 
and hopes, made of imaginations and suggestions, not 
significant of a world of objective fact intellectually 
confronted. It is poetry and drama, rather than 
science, and is apart from scientific truth and falsity, 
rationality or absurdity of fact in the same way in 
which poetry is independent of these things. 

This original material has, however, to pass through 
at least two stages before it becomes philosophy proper. 
One is the stage in which stories and legends and their 
accompanying dramatizations are consolidated. At 
first the emotionalized records of experiences are largely 
casual and transitory. Events that excite the emotions 
of an individual are seized upon and lived over in tale 



8 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and pantomime. But some experiences are so frequent 
and recurrent that they concern the group as a whole. 
They are socially generalized. The piecemeal adventure 
of the single individual is built out till it becomes repre- 
sentative and typical of the emotional life of the tribe. 
Certain incidents affect the weal and woe of the group in 
its entirety and thereby get an exceptional emphasis and 
elevation. A certain texture of tradition is built up; 
the story becomes a social heritage and possession; 
the pantomime develops into the stated rite. Tradition 
thus formed becomes a kind of norm to which individual 
fancy and suggestion conform. An abiding framework 
of imagination is constructed. A communal way of 
conceiving life grows up into which individuals are 
inducted by education. Both unconsciously and by 
definite social requirement individual memories are 
assimilated to group memory or tradition, and indi- 
vidual fancies are accommodated to the body of beliefs 
characteristic of a community. Poetry becomes fixated 
and systematized. The story becomes a social norm. 
The original drama which re-enacts an emotionally im- 
portant experience is institutionalized into a cult. Sug- 
gestions previously free are hardened into doctrines. 

The systematic and obligatory nature of such doc- 
trines is hastened and confirmed through conquests and 
political consolidation. As the area of a government is 
extended, there is a definite motive for systematizing 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 9 

and unifying beliefs once free and floating. Aside from 
natural accommodation and assimilation springing from 
the fact of intercourse and the needs of common under- 
standing, there is often political necessity which leads 
the ruler to centralize traditions and beliefs in order 
to extend and strengthen his prestige and authority. 
Judea, Greece, Rome, and I presume all other countries 
having a long history, present records of a continual 
working over of earlier local rites and doctrines in the 
interests of a wider social unity and a more extensive 
political power. I shall ask you to assume with me 
that in this way the larger cosmogonies and cosmologies 
of the race as well as the larger ethical traditions have 
arisen. Whether this is literally so or not, it is not 
necessary to inquire, much less to demonstrate. It is 
enough for our purposes that under social influences 
there took place a fixing and organizing of doctrines 
and cults which gave general traits to the imagination' 
and general rules to conduct, and that such a consolida- 
tion was a necessary antecedent to the formation of 
any philosophy as we understand that term. 

Although a necessary antecedent, this organization 
and generalization of ideas and principles of belief is 
not the sole and sufficient generator of philosophy. 
There is still lacking the motive for logical system and 
intellectual proof. This we may suppose to be furnished 
by the need of reconciling the moral rules and ideals em- 



10 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

bodied in the traditional code with the matter of fact 
positivistic knowledge which gradually grows up. For 
man can never be wholly the creature of suggestion 
and fancy. The requirements of continued existence 
make indispensable some attention to the actual facts 
of the world. Although it is surprising how little check 
the environment actually puts upon the formation of 
ideas, since no notions are too absurd not to have been 
accepted by some people, yet the environment does 
enforce a certain minimum of correctness under penalty 
of extinction. That certain things are foods, that they 
are to be found in certain places, that water drowns, 
fire burns, that sharp points penetrate and cut, that 
heavy things fall unless supported, that there is a 
certain regularity in the changes of day and night and 
the alternation of hot and cold, wet and dry: — such 
prosaic facts force themselves upon even primitive atten- 
tion. Some of them are so obvious and so important 
that they have next to no fanciful context. Auguste 
Comte says somewhere that he knows of no savage 
people who had a God of weight although every other 
natural quality or force may have been deified. Gradu- 
ally there grows up a body of homely generalizations 
preserving and transmitting the wisdom of the race 
about the observed facts and sequences of nature. This 
knowledge is especially connected with industries, arts 
and crafts where observation of materials and processes 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 11 

is required for successful action, and where action is 
so continuous and regular that spasmodic magic will 
not suffice. Extravagantly fantastic notions are 
eliminated because they are brought into juxtaposition 
with what actually happens. 

The sailor is more likely to be given to what we now 
term superstitions than say the weaver, because his 
activity is more at the mercy of sudden change and 
unforeseen occurrence. But even the sailor while he 
may regard the wind as the uncontrollable expression 
of the caprice of a great spirit, will still have to become 
acquainted with some purely mechanical principles of 
adjustment of boat, sails and oar to the wind. Fire 
may be conceived as a supernatural dragon because some 
time or other a swift, bright and devouring flame called 
before the mind's eye the quick-moving and dangerous 
serpent. But the housewife who tends the fire and the 
pots wherein food cooks will still be compelled to observe 
certain mechanical facts of draft and replenishment, 
and passage from wood to ash. Still more will the 
worker in metals accumulate verifiable details about the 
conditions and consequences of the operation of heat. 
He may retain for special and ceremonial occasions 
traditional beliefs, but everyday familiar use will expel 
these conceptions for the greater part of the time, when 
fire will be to him of uniform and prosaic behavior, 
controllable by practical relations of cause and effect. 



12 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

As the arts and crafts develop and become more elabo- 
rate, the body of positive and tested knowledge enlarges, 
and the sequences observed become more complex and of 
greater scope. Technologies of this kind give that 
common-sense knowledge of nature out of which science 
takes its origin. They provide not merely a collection 
of positive facts, but they give expertness in dealing 
with materials and tools, and promote the development 
of the experimental habit of mind, as soon as an art 
can be taken away from the rule of sheer custom. 

For a long time the imaginative body of beliefs closely 
connected with the moral habits of a community group 
and with its emotional indulgences and consolations per- 
sists side by side with the growing body of matter of 
fact knowledge. Wherever possible they are interlaced. 
At other points, their inconsistencies forbid their inter- 
weaving, but the two things are kept apart as if in 
different compartments. Since one is merely super- 
imposed upon the other their incompatibility is not felt, 
and there is no need of reconciliation. In most cases, 
the two kinds of mental products are kept apart because 
they become the possession of separate social classes. 
The religious and poetic beliefs having acquired a defi- 
nite social and political value and function are in the 
keeping of a higher class directly associated with the 
ruling elements in the society. The workers and crafts- 
men who possess the prosaic matter of fact knowledge 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 13 

are likely to occupy a low social status, and their kind 
of knowledge is affected by the social disesteem enter- 
tained for the manual worker who engages in activities 
useful to the body. It doubtless was this fact in Greece 
which in spite of the keenness of observation, the ex- 
traordinary power of logical reasoning and the great 
freedom of speculation attained by the Athenian, post- 
poned the general and systematic employment of the 
experimental method. Since the industrial craftsman 
was only just above the slave in social rank, his type of 
knowledge and the method upon which it depended 
lacked prestige and authority. 

Nevertheless, the time came when matter of fact 
knowledge increased to such bulk and scope that it 
came into conflict with not merely the detail but with the 
spirit and temper of traditional and imaginative beliefs. 
Without going into the vexed question of how and why, 
there is no doubt that this is just what happened in 
what we term the sophistic movement in Greece, within 
which originated philosophy proper in the sense in 
which the western world understands that term. The 
fact that the sophists had a bad name given them by 
Plato and Aristotle, a name they have never been able 
to shake off, is evidence that with the sophists the 
strife between the two types of belief was the emphatic 
thing, and that the conflict had a disconcerting effect 
upon the traditional system of religious beliefs and the 



14 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

moral code of conduct bound up with it. Although 
Socrates was doubtless sincerely interested in the recon- 
ciliation of the two sides, yet the fact that he ap- 
proached the matter from the side of matter of 
fact method, giving its canons and criteria primacy, 
was enough to bring him to the condemnation of 
death as a contemner of the gods and a corrupter of 
youth. 

The fate of Socrates and the ill-fame of the sophists 
may be used to suggest some of the striking contrasts 
between traditional emotionalized belief on one hand 
and prosaic matter of fact knowledge on the other: — 
the purpose of the comparison being to bring out the 
point that while all the advantages of what we call 
science were on the side of the latter, the advantages of 
social esteem and authority, and of intimate contact 
with what gives life its deeper lying values were on the 
side of traditional belief. To all appearances, the 
specific and verified knowledge of the environment had 
only a limited and technical scope. It had to do with 
the arts, and the purpose and good of the artisan after 
all did not extend very far. They were subordinate and 
almost servile. Who would put the art of the shoe- 
maker on the same plane as the art of ruling the state? 
Who would put even the higher art of the physician 
in healing the body, upon the level of the art of the 
priest in healing the soul? Thus Plato constantly 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 15 

draws the contrast in his dialogues. The shoemaker is 
a judge of a good pair of shoes, but he is no judge at 
all of the more important question whether and when 
it is good to wear shoes ; the physician is a good judge 
of health, but whether it is a good thing or not to be 
well or better to die, he knows not. While the artisan 
is expert as long as purely limited technical questions 
arise, he is helpless when it comes to the only really 
important questions, the moral questions as to values. 
Consequently, his type of knowledge is inherently in- 
ferior and needs to be controlled by a higher kind of 
knowledge which will reveal ultimate ends and purposes, 
and thus put and keep technical and mechanical knowl- 
edge in its proper place. Moreover, in Plato's pages we 
find, because of Plato's adequate dramatic sense, a lively 
depicting of the impact in particular men of the conflict 
between tradition and the new claims of purely intellec- 
tual knowledge. The conservative is shocked beyond 
measure at the idea of teaching the military art by 
abstract rules, by science. One does not just fight, 
one fights for one's country. Abstract science cannot 
convey love and loyalty, nor can it be a substitute, even 
upon the more technical side, for those ways and means 
of fighting in which devotion to the country has been 
traditionally embodied. 

The way to learn the fighting art is through associa- 
tion with those who have themselves learned to defend 



16 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

the country, by becoming saturated with its ideals and 
customs ; by becoming in short a practical adept in the 
Greek tradition as to fighting. To attempt to derive 
abstract rules from a comparison of native ways of 
fighting with the enemies' ways is to begin to go over 
to the enemies' traditions and gods : it is to begin to be 
false to one's own country. 

Such a point of view vividly realized enables us to 
appreciate the antagonism aroused by the positivistic 
point of view when it came into conflict with the tradi- 
tional. The latter was deeply rooted in social habits 
and loyalties; it was surcharged with the moral aims 
for which men lived and the moral rules by which they 
lived. Hence it was as basic and as comprehensive as 
life itself, and palpitated with the warm glowing colors 
of the community life in which men realized their own 
being. In contrast, the positivistic knowledge was con- 
cerned with merely physical utilities, and lacked the 
ardent associations of belief hallowed by sacrifices of 
ancestors and worship of contemporaries. Because of 
its limited and concrete character it was dry, hard, 
cold. 

Yet the more acute and active minds, like that of 
Plato himself, could no longer be content to accept, 
along with the conservative citizen of the time, the 
old beliefs in the old way. The growth of positive 
knowledge and of the critical, inquiring spirit under- 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 17 

mined these in their old form. The advantages in 
definiteness, in accuracy, in verifiability were all on the 
side of the new knowledge. Tradition was noble in 
aim and scope, but uncertain in foundation. The un- 
questioned life, said Socrates, was not one fit to be lived 
by man, who is a questioning being because he is a 
rational being. Hence he must search out the reason 
of things, and not accept them from custom and political 
authority. What was to be done ? Develop a method of 
rational investigation and proof which should place the 
essential elements of traditional belief upon an unshak- 
able basis ; develop a method of thought and knowledge 
which while purifying tradition should preserve its 
moral and social values unimpaired; nay, by purify- 
ing them, add to their power and authority. To put 
it in a word, that which had rested upon custom was 
to be restored, resting no longer upon the habits of 
the past, but upon the very metaphysics of Being and 
the Universe. Metaphysics is a substitute for custom 
as the source and guarantor of higher moral and 
social values — that is the leading theme of the classic 
philosophy of Europe, as evolved by Plato and 
Aristotle — a philosophy, let us always recall, renewed 
and restated by the Christian philosophy of Medieval 
Europe. 

Out of this situation emerged, if I mistake not, the 
entire tradition regarding the function and office of 



18 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

philosophy which till very recently has controlled the 
systematic and constructive philosophies of the western 
world. If I am right in my main thesis that the origin 
of philosophy lay in an attempt to reconcile the two 
different types of mental product, then the key is in 
our hands as to the main traits of subsequent philosophy 
so far as that was not of a negative and heterodox 
kind. In the first place, philosophy did not develop in 
an unbiased way from an open and unprejudiced origin. 
It had its task cut out for it from the start. It had a 
mission to perform, and it was sworn in advance to that 
mission. It had to extract the essential moral kernel 
out of the threatened traditional beliefs of the past. So 
far so good; the work was critical and in the interests 
of the only true conservatism — that which will conserve 
and not waste the values wrought out by humanity. 
But it was also precommitted to extracting this moral 
essence in a spirit congenial to the spirit of past be- 
liefs. The association with imagination and with social 
authority was too intimate to be deeply disturbed. It 
was not possible to conceive of the content of social 
institutions in any form radically different from that in 
which they had existed in the past. It became the 
work of philosophy to justify on rational grounds the 
spirit, though not the form, of accepted beliefs and 
traditional customs. 

The resulting philosophy seemed radical enough and 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 19 

even dangerous to the average Athenian because of the 
difference of form and method. In the sense of pruning 
away excrescences and eliminating factors which to the 
average citizen were all one with the basic beliefs, it 
was radical. But looked at in the perspective of history 
and in contrast with different types of thought which 
developed later in different social environments, it is 
now easy to see how profoundly, after all, Plato and 
Aristotle reflected the meaning of Greek tradition and 
habit, so that their writings remain, with the writings 
of the great dramatists, the best introduction of a stu- 
dent into the innermost ideals and aspirations of dis- 
tinctively Greek life. Without Greek religion, Greek 
art, Greek civic life, their philosophy would have been 
impossible; while the effect of that science upon which 
the philosophers most prided themselves turns out to 
have been superficial and negligible. This apologetic 
spirit of philosophy is even more apparent when Medie- 
val Christianity about the twelfth century sought for a 
systematic rational presentation of itself and made 
use of classic philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, to 
justify itself to reason. A not unsimilar occurrence 
characterizes the chief philosophic systems of Germany 
in the early nineteenth century, when Hegel assumed the 
task of justifying in the name of rational idealism the 
doctrines and institutions which were menaced by the 
new spirit of science and popular government. The 



20 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

result has been that the great systems have not been 
free from party spirit exercised in behalf of pre- 
conceived beliefs. Since they have at the same time 
professed complete intellectual independence and ration- 
ality, the result has been too often to impart to philoso- 
phy an element of insincerity, all the more insidious be- 
cause wholly unconscious on the part of those who 
sustained philosophy. 

And this brings us to a second trait of philosophy 
springing from its origin. Since it aimed at a rational 
justification of things that had been previously accepted 
because of their emotional congeniality and social pres- 
tige, it had to make much of the apparatus of reason 
and proof. Because of the lack of intrinsic rationality 
in the matters with which it dealt, it leaned over back- 
ward, so to speak, in parade of logical form. In dealing 
with matters of fact, simpler and rougher ways of 
demonstration may be resorted to. It is enough, so to 
say, to produce the fact in question and point to it — 
the fundamental form of all demonstration. But when 
it comes to convincing men of the truth of doctrines 
which are no longer to be accepted upon the say-so of 
custom and social authority, but which also are not 
capable of empirical verification, there is no recourse 
save to magnify the signs of rigorous thought and rigid 
demonstration. Thus arises that appearance of ab- 
stract definition and ultra-scientific argumentation 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 21 

which repels so many from philosophy but which has 
been one of its chief attractions to its devotees. 

At the worst, this has reduced philosophy to a show 
of elaborate terminology, a hair-splitting logic, and a 
fictitious devotion to the mere external forms of com- 
prehensive and minute demonstration. Even at the 
best, it has tended to produce an overdeveloped attach- 
ment to system for its own sake, and an over-pretentious 
claim to certainty. Bishop Butler declared that proba- 
bility is the guide of tif e ; but few philosophers have been 
courageous enough to avow that philosophy can be 
satisfied with anything that is merely probable. The 
customs dictated by tradition and desire had claimed 
finality and immutability. They had claimed to give 
certain and unvarying laws of conduct. Very early in 
its history philosophy made pretension to a similar 
conclusiveness, and something of this temper has clung 
to classic philosophies ever since. They have insisted 
that they were more scientific than the sciences — that, 
indeed, philosophy was necessary because after all the 
special sciences fail in attaining final and complete 
truth. There have been a few dissenters who have ven- 
tured to assert, as did William James, that " philosophy 
is vision " and that its chief function is to free men's 
minds from bias and prejudice and to enlarge their 
perceptions of the world about them. But in the main 
philosophy has set up much more ambitious pretensions. 



22 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

To say frankly that philosophy can proffer nothing but 
hypotheses, and that these hypotheses are of value 
only as they render men's minds more sensitive to life 
about them, would seem like a negation of philosophy 
itself. 

In the third place, the body of beliefs dictated by 
desire and imagination and developed under the in- 
fluence of communal authority into an authoritative 
tradition, was pervasive and comprehensive. It was, so 
to speak, omnipresent in all the details of the group 
life. Its pressure was unremitting and its influence 
universal. It was then probably inevitable that the 
rival principle, reflective thought, should aim at a simi- 
lar universality and comprehensiveness. It would be 
as inclusive and far-reaching metaphysically as tradi- 
tion had been socially. Now there was just one way 
in which this pretension could be accomplished in con- 
junction with a claim of complete logical system and 
certainty. 

All philosophies of the classic type have made a 
fixed and fundamental distinction between two realms 
of existence. One of these corresponds to the re- 
ligious and supernatural world of popular tradition, 
which in its metaphysical rendering became the world 
of highest and ultimate reality. Since the final source 
and sanction of all important truths and rules of con- 
duct in community life had been found in superior and 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 23 

unquestioned religious beliefs, so the absolute and 
supreme reality of philosophy afforded the only sure 
guaranty of truth about empirical matters, and the sole 
rational guide to proper social institutions and indi- 
vidual behavior. Over against this absolute and noume- 
nal reality which could be apprehended only by the 
systematic discipline of philosophy itself stood the ordi- 
nary empirical, relatively real, phenomenal world of 
everyday experience. It was with this world that the 
practical affairs and utilities of men were connected. 
It was to this imperfect and perishing world that mat- 
ter of fact, positivistic science referred. 

This is the trait which, in my opinion, has affected 
most deeply the classic notion about the nature of 
philosophy. Philosophy has arrogated to itself the 
office of demonstrating the existence of a transcendent, 
absolute or inner reality and of revealing to man the 
nature and features of this ultimate and higher reality. 
It has therefore claim ed that it was in possession of a 
higher organ of knowledge than is employed by posi- 
tive science and ordinary practical experience, and 
that it is marked by a superior dignity and 
importance — a claim which is undeniable if philoso- 
phy leads man to proof and intuition of a Reality be- 
yond that open to day-by-day life and the special 
sciences. 

This claim has, of course, been denied by various 



24 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

philosophers from time to time. But for the most part 
these denials have been agnostic and sceptical. They 
have contented themselves with asserting that absolute 
and ultimate reality is beyond human ken. But they 
have not ventured to deny that such Reality would be 
the appropriate sphere for the exercise of philosophic 
knowledge provided only it were within the reach of 
human intelligence. Only comparatively recently has 
another conception of the proper office of philosophy 
arisen. This course of lectures will be devoted to 
setting forth this different conception of philosophy in 
some of its main contrasts to what this lecture has 
termed the classic conception. At this point, it can be 
referred to only by anticipation and in cursory fashion. 
It is implied in the account which has been given of the 
origin of philosophy out of the background of an 
authoritative tradition; a tradition originally dictated 
by man's imagination working under the influence of 
love and hate and in the interest of emotional excite- 
ment and satisfaction. Common frankness requires that 
it be stated that this account of the origin of philoso- 
phies claiming to deal with absolute Being in a sys- 
tematic way has been given with malice prepense. It 
seems to me that this genetic method of approach is a 
more effective way of undermining this type of philo- 
sophic theorizing than any attempt at logical refutation 
could be.. 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 25 

If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a 
reasonable hypothesis the idea that philosophy origi- 
nated not out of intellectual material, but out of social 
and emotional material, it will also succeed in leaving 
with you a changed attitude toward traditional philoso- 
phies. They will be viewed from a new angle and placed 
in a new light. New questions about them will be 
aroused and new standards for judging them will be 
suggested. 

If any one will commence without mental reservations 
to study the history of philosophy not as an isolated 
thing but as a chapter in the development of civiliza- 
tion and culture ; if one will connect the story of philoso- 
phy with a study of anthropology, primitive life, the 
history of religion, literature and social institutions, it 
is confidently asserted that he will reach his own inde- 
pendent judgment as to the worth of the account which 
has been presented today. Considered in this way, the 
history of philosophy will take on a new significance. 
What is lost from the standpoint of would-be science is 
regained from the standpoint of humanity. Instead 
of the disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we 
have the scene of human clash of social purpose and 
aspirations. Instead of impossible attempts to tran- 
scend experience, we have the significant record of the 
efforts of men to formulate the things of experience to 
which they are most deeply and passionately attached. 



w 



26 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

Instead of impersonal and purely speculative endeavors 
to contemplate as remote beholders the nature of abso- 
lute things-in-themselves, we have a living picture of the 
choice of thoughtful men about what they would have 
life to be, and to what ends they would have men shape 
their intelligent activities. 

Any one of you who arrives at such a view of past 
philosophy will of necessity be led to entertain a quite 
definite conception of the scope and aim of future 
philosophizing. He will inevitably be committed to the 
notion that what philosophy has been unconsciously, 
without knowing or intending it, and, so to speak, under 
cover, it must henceforth be openly and deliberately. 
When it is acknowledged that under disguise of dealing 
-' with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with 
the precious values embedded in social traditions, that 
it has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a 
conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible con- 
temporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of 
future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the 
social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to 
become so far as is humanly possible an organ for deal- 
ing with these conflicts. That which may be preten- 
tiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical 
distinctions becomes intensely significant when connected 
with the drama of the struggle of social beliefs and 
ideals. Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat 



CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 27 

barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Abso- 
lute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening 
the moral forces which move mankind and in contribut- 
ing to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered 
and intelligent happiness. 



CHAPTER II 

SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS IN PHILOSOPHI- 
CAL RECONSTRUCTION 

Francis Bacon of the Elizabethan age is the great 
forerunner of the spirit of modern life. Though slight 
in accomplishment, as a prophet of new tendencies he 
is an outstanding figure of the world's intellectual life. 
Like many another prophet he suffers from confused 
intermingling of old and new. What is most signifi- 
cant in him has been rendered more or less familiar by 
the later course of events. But page after page is filled 
with matter which belongs to the past from which 
Bacon thought he had escaped. Caught between these 
two sources of easy disparagement, Bacon hardly re- 
ceives his due as the real founder of modern thought, 
while he is praised for merits which scarcely belong 
to him, such as an alleged authorship of the specific 
methods of induction pursued by science. What makes 
Bacon memorable is that breezes blowing from a new 
world caught and filled his sails and stirred him to ad- 
venture in new seas. He never himself discovered the 
land of promise, but he proclaimed the new goal and 
by faith he descried its features from afar. 

28 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 29 

The main traits of his thought put before our mind 
the larger features of a new spirit which was at work in 
causing intellectual reconstruction. They may suggest 
the social and historical forces out of which the new 
spirit was born. The best known aphorism of Bacon 
is that Knowledge is Power. Judged by this pragmatic 
criterion, he condemned the great body of learning then 
extant as 7io£-knowledge, as pseudo- and pretentious- 
knowledge. For it did not give power. It was otiose, 
not operative. In his most extensive discussion he 
classified the learning of his day under three heads, 
delicate, fantastic and contentious. Under delicate 
learning, he included the literary learning which through 
the influence of the revival of ancient languages and 
literatures occupied so important a place in the intellec- 
tual life of the Renaissance. Bacon's condemnation is 
the more effective because he himself was a master of 
the classics and of all the graces and refinements which 
this literary study was intended to convey. In sub- 
stance he anticipated most of the attacks which educa- 
tional reformers since his time have made upon one- 
sided literary culture. It contributed not to power but 
to ornament and decoration. It was ostentatious and 
luxurious. By fantastic learning he meant the quasi- 
magical science that was so rife all over Europe in the 
sixteenth century — wild developments of alchemy, 
astrology, etc. Upon this he poured his greatest vials 



SO RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

of wrath because the corruption of the good is the 
worst of evils. Delicate learning was idle and vain, but 
fantastic learning aped the form of true knowledge. 
It laid hold of the true principle and aim of knowledge — 
control of natural forces. But it neglected the condi- 
tions and methods by which alone such knowledge could 
be obtained, and thus deliberately led men astray. 

For our purposes, however, what he says about con- 
tentious learning is the most important. For by this, he 
means the traditional science which had come down, in 
scanty and distorted measure to be sure, from antiquity 
through scholasticism. It is called contentious both 
because of the logical method used and the end to which 
it was put. In a certain sense it aimed at power, but 
power over other men in the interest of some class or 
sect or person, not power over natural forces in the 
common interest of all. Bacon's conviction of the quar- 
relsome, self-displaying character of the scholarship 
which had come down from antiquity was of course not 
so much due to Greek science itself as to the degenerate 
heritage of scholasticism in the fourteenth century, 
when philosophy had fallen into the hands of disputa- 
tious theologians, full of hair-splitting argumentative- 
ness and quirks and tricks by which to win victory over 
somebody else. 

But Bacon also brought his charge against the 
Aristotelian method itself. In its rigorous forms it 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 31 

aimed at demonstration, and in its milder forms at 
persuasion. But both demonstration and persuasion 
aim at conquest of mind rather than of nature. More- 
over they both assume that some one is already in pos- 
session of a truth or a belief, and that the only problem 
is to convince some one else, or to teach. In contrast, 
his new method had an exceedingly slight opinion of the 
amount of truth already existent, and a lively sense of 
the extent and importance of truths still to be attained. 
It would be a logic of discovery, not a logic of argu- 
mentation, proof and persuasion. To Bacon, the old 
logic even at its best was a logic for teaching the already 
known, and teaching meant indoctrination, discipling. 
It was an axiom of Aristotle that only that which was 
already known could be learned, that growth in knowl- 
edge consisted simply in bringing together a universal 
truth of reason and a particular truth of sense which 
had previously been noted separately. In any case, 
learning meant growth of knowledge, and growth be- 
longs in the region of becoming, change, and hence is 
inferior to possession of knowledge in the syllogistic 
self-revolving manipulation of what was already known 
— demonstration. 

In contrast with this point of view, Bacon eloquently 
proclaimed the superiority of discovery of new facts 
and truths to demonstration of the old. Now there is 
only one road to discovery, and that is penetrating in- 



32 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

quiry into the secrets of nature. Scientific principles 
and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are 
hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active 
and elaborate technique of inquiry. Neither logical 
reasoning nor the passive accumulation of any number 
of observations — which the ancients called experience — 
suffices to lay hold of them. Active experimentation 
must force the apparent facts of nature into forms 
different to those in which they familiarly present them- 
selves; and thus make them tell the truth about them- 
selves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to re- 
veal what he has been concealing. Pure reasoning as a 
means of arriving at truth is like the spider who spins 
a web out of himself. The web is orderly and elaborate, 
but it is only a trap. The passive accumulation of 
experiences — the traditional empirical method — is like 
the ant who busily runs about and collects and piles up 
heaps of raw materials. True method, that which Bacon 
would usher in, is comparable to the operations of the 
bee who, like the ant, collects material from the external 
world, but unlike that industrious creature attacks and 
modifies the collected stuff in order to make it yield its 
hidden treasure. 

Along with this contrast between subjugation of na- 
ture and subjection of other minds and the elevation 
of a method of discovery above a method of demonstra- 
tion, went Bacon's sense of progress as the aim and 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 33 

test of genuine knowledge. According to his criticisms, 
the classic logic, even in its Aristotelian form, inevitably 
played into the hands of inert conservatism. For in 
accustoming the mind to think of truth as already 
known, it habituated men to fall back on the intellectual 
attainments of the past, and to accept them without 
critical scrutiny. Not merely the medieval but the 
renaissance mind tended to look back to antiquity as a 
Golden Age of Knowledge, the former relying upon 
sacred scriptures, the latter upon secular literatures. 
And while this attitude could not fairly be charged up 
against the classic logic, yet Bacon felt, and with 
justice, that any logic which identified the technique 
of knowing with demonstration of truths already pos- 
sessed by the mind, blunts the spirit of investigation and 
confines the mind within the circle of traditional learn- 
ing. 

Such a logic could not avoid having for its salient 
features definition of what is already known (or thought 
to be known), and its systematization according to 
recognized canons of orthodoxy. A logic of discovery 
on the other hand looks to the future. Received truth 
it regards critically as something to be tested by new 
experiences rather than as something to be dogmatically 
taught and obediently received. Its chief interest in 
even the most carefully tested ready-made knowledge 
is the use which may be made of it in further inquiries 



34 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and discoveries. Old truth has its chief value in assist- 
ing the detection of new truth. Bacon's own apprecia- 
tion of the nature of induction was highly defective. 
But his acute sense that science means invasion of the 
unknown, rather than repetition in logical form of the 
already known, makes him nevertheless the father of 
induction. Endless and persistent uncovering of facts 
and principles not known — such is the true spirit of 
induction. Continued progress in knowledge is the only 
sure way of protecting old knowledge from degeneration 
into dogmatic doctrines received on authority, or from 
imperceptible decay into superstition and old wives' 
tales. 

Ever-renewed progress is to Bacon the test as well 
as the aim of genuine logic. Where, Bacon constantly 
demands, where are the works, the fruits, of the older 
logic? What has it done to ameliorate the evils of life, 
/ to rectify defects, to improve conditions ? Where are 
the inventions that justify its claim to be in possession 
of truth? Beyond the victory of man over man in 
law courts, diplomacy and political administration, 
they are nil. One had to turn from admired " sciences " 
to despised arts to find works, fruits, consequences of 
value to human kind through power over natural forces. 
And progress in the arts was as yet intermittent, fitful, 
accidental. A true logic or technique of inquiry would 
make advance in the industrial, agricultural and medi- 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 35 

cal arts continuous, cumulative and deliberately sys- 
tematic. 

If we take into account the supposed body of ready- 
made knowledge upon which learned men rested in 
supine acquiescence and which they recited in parrot- 
like chorus, we find it consists of two parts. One 
of these parts is made up of the errors of our ances- 
tors, musty with antiquity and organized into pseudo- 
science through the use of the classic logic. Such 
" truths " are in fact only the systematized mistakes 
and prejudices of our ancestors. Many of them origi- 
nated in accident ; many in class interest and bias, per- 
petuated by authority for this very reason — a consid- 
eration which later actuated Locke's attack upon the 
doctrine of innate ideas. The other portion of accepted 
beliefs comes from instinctive tendencies of the human 
mind that give it a dangerous bias until counteracted 
by a conscious and critical logic. 

The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater sim- 
plicity, uniformity and unity among phenomena than 
actually exists. It follows superficial analogies and 
jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of de- 
tails and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a 
web of purely internal origin which it imposes upon 
nature. What had been termed science in the past con- 
sisted of this humanly constructed and imposed web. 
Men looked at the work of their own minds and thought 



s 



36 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

they were seeing realities in nature. They were wor- 
shipping, under the name of science, the idols of their 
own making. So-called science and philosophy con- 
sisted of these " anticipations " of nature. And the 
worst thing that could be said about traditional logic 
was that instead of saving man from this natural source 
of error, it had, though attributing to nature a false 
rationality of unity, simplicity and generality, sanc- 
tioned these sources of delusion. The office of the new 
logic would be to protect the mind against itself: to 
teach it to undergo a patient and prolonged appren- 
ticeship to fact in its infinite variety and particularity : 
to obey nature intellectually in order to command it 
practically. Such was the significance of the new logic 
— the new tool or organon of learning, so named in 
express opposition to the organon of Aristotle. 

Certain other important oppositions are implied. 
Aristotle thought of reason as capable of solitary com- 
munion with rational truth. The counterpart of his 
celebrated saying that man is a political animal, is that 
Intelligence, Nous, is neither animal, human nor politi- 
cal. It is divinely unique and self-enclosed. To Bacon, 
error had been produced and perpetuated by social in- 
fluences, and truth must be discovered by social agencies 
organized for that purpose. Left to himself, the indi- 
vidual can do little or nothing; he is likely to become 
involved in his own self-spun web of misconceptions. 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 37 

The great need is the organization of co-operative re- 
search, whereby men attack nature collectively and the 
work of inquiry is carried on continuously from genera- 
tion to generation. Bacon even aspired to the rather 
absurd notion of a method so perfected that differences 
in natural human ability might be discounted, and all 
be put on the same level in production of new facts 
and new truths. Yet this absurdity was only the nega- 
tive side of his great positive prophecy of a combined 
and co-operative pursuit of science such as characterizes 
our own day. In view of the picture he draws in his 
New Atlantis of a State organized for collective inquiry, 
we readily forgive him his exaggerations. 

Power over nature was not to be individual but col- 
lective; the Empire, as he says, of Man over Nature, 
substituted for the Empire of Man over Man. Let us 
employ Bacon's own words with their variety of pic- 
turesque metaphor : " Men have entered into the desire 
of learning and knowledge, . . . seldom sincerely to 
give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit 
and use of men, but as if they sought in knowledge a 
couch whereon to rest a searching and wandering spirit ; 
or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk 
up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower for a 
proud mind to raise itself upon ; or a fort or command- 
ing ground for strife and contention; or a shop for 
profit and sale ; and not a rich storehouse for the glory 



38 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

of the creator and the relief of man's estate." When 
William James called Pragmatism a New Name for an 
Old Way of Thinking, I do not know that he was think- 
ing expressly of Francis Bacon, but so far as concerns 
the spirit and atmosphere of the pursuit of knowledge, 
Bacon may be taken as the prophet of a pragmatic 
conception of knowledge. Many misconceptions of its 
spirit would be avoided if his emphasis upon the social 
factor in both the pursuit and the end of knowledge were 
carefully observed. 

This somewhat over-long resume of Bacon's ideas has 
not been gone into as a matter of historic retrospect. 
The summary is rather meant to put before our minds 
an authentic document of the new philosophy which may 
bring into relief the social causes of intellectual revolu- 
tion. Only a sketchy account can be here attempted, 
but it may be of some assistance even barely to remind 
you of the direction of that industrial, political and 
religious change upon which Europe was entering. 

Upon the industrial side, it is impossible, I think, 
to exaggerate the influence of travel, exploration and 
new commerce which fostered a romantic sense of ad- 
venture into novelty; loosened the hold of traditional 
beliefs ; created a lively sense of new worlds to be investi- 
gated and subdued ; produced new methods of manufac- 
ture, commerce, banking and finance; and then reacted 
everywhere to stimulate invention, and to intro- 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 39 

duce positive observation and active experimentation 
into science. The Crusades, the revival of the profane 
learning of antiquity and even more perhaps, the con- 
tact with the advanced learning of the Mohammedans, 
the increase of commerce with Asia and Africa, the 
introduction of the lens, compass and gunpowder, the 
finding and opening up of North and South America — 
most significantly called The New World — these are 
some of the obvious external facts. Contrast between 
peoples and races previously isolated is always, I think, 
most fruitful and influential for change when psycho- 
logical and industrial changes coincide with and rein- 
force each other. Sometimes people undergo emotional 
change, what might almost be called a metaphysical 
change, through intercourse. The inner set of the mind, 
especially in religious matters, is altered. At other 
times, there is a lively exchange of goods, an adoption 
of foreign tools and devices, an imitation of alien habits 
of clothing, habitation and production of commodities. 
One of these changes is, so to speak, too internal and the 
other too external to bring about a profound intellectual 
development. But when the creation of a new mental 
attitude falls together with extensive material and 
economic changes, something significant happens. 

This coincidence of two kinds of change was, I take it, 
characteristic of the new contacts of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. Clash of customs and traditional 



40 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

beliefs dispelled mental inertia and sluggishness ; it 
aroused a lively curiosity as to different and new ideas. 
The actual adventure of travel and exploration purged 
the mind of fear of the strange and unknown: as new 
territories geographically and commercially speaking 
were opened up, the mind was opened up. New contacts 
promoted the desire for still more contacts ; the appetite 
for novelty and discovery grew by what it fed upon. 
Conservative adherence to old beliefs and methods 
underwent a steady attrition with every new voyage 
into new parts and every new report of foreign ways. 
The mind became used to exploration and discovery. It 
found a delight and interest in the revelations of the 
novel and the unusual which it no longer took in what 
was old and customary. Moreover, the very act of 
exploration, of expedition, the process of enterprising 
adventure into the remote, yielded a peculiar joy and 
thrill. 

This psychological change was essential to the birth 
of the new point of view in science and philosophy. 
Yet alone it could hardly have produced the new method 
of knowing. But positive changes in the habits and 
purposes of life gave objective conformation and sup- 
port to the mental change. They also determined the 
channels in which the new spirit found exercise. New- 
found wealth, the gold from the Americas and new arti- 
cles of consumption and enjoyment, tended to wean men 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 41 

from preoccupation with the metaphysical and theologi- 
cal, and to turn their minds with newly awakened in- 
terest to the joys of nature and this life. New material 
resources and new markets in America and India under- 
mined the old dependence upon household and manual 
production for a local and limited market, and generated 
quantitative, large scale production by means of steam 
for foreign and expanding markets. Capitalism, rapid 
transit, and production for exchange against money and 
for profit, instead of against goods and for consump- 
tion, followed. 

This cursory and superficial reminder of vast and 
complicated events may suggest the mutual interde- 
pendence of the scientific revolution and the industrial 
revolution. Upon the one hand, modern industry is so 
much applied science. No amount of desire to make 
money, or to enjoy new commodities, no amount of mere 
practical energy and enterprise, would have effected the 
economic transformation of the last few centuries and 
generations. Improvements in mathematical, physical, 
chemical and biological science were prerequisites. 
Business men through engineers of different sorts, have 
laid hold of the new insights gained by scientific men 
into the hidden energies of nature, and have turned 
them to account. The modern mine, factory, railway, 
steamship, telegraph, all of the appliances and equip- 
ment of production, and transportation, express scienti- 



42 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

fie knowledge. They would continue unimpaired even 
if the ordinary pecuniary accompaniments of economic 
activity were radically altered. In short, through the 
intermediary of invention, Bacon's watchword that 
knowledge is power and his dream of continuous empire 
over natural forces by means of natural science have 
been actualized. The industrial revolution by steam 
and electricity is the reply to Bacon's prophecy. 

On the other hand, it is equally true that the needs 
of modern industry have been tremendous stimuli to 
scientific investigation. The demands of progressive 
production and transportation have set new problems 
to inquiry; the processes used in industry have sug- 
gested new experimental appliances and operations in 
science ; the wealth rolled up in business has to some ex- 
tent been diverted to endowment of research. The un- 
interrupted and pervasive interaction of scientific dis- 
covery and industrial application has fructified both 
science and industry, and has brought home to the con- 
temporary mind the fact that the gist of scientific 
knowledge is control of natural energies. These four 
facts, natural science, experimentation, control and 
progress have been inextricably bound up together. 
That up to the present the application of the newer 
methods and results has influenced the means of life 
rather than its ends ; or, better put, that human aims 
have so far been affected in an accidental rather than 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 43 

in an intelligently directed way, signifies that so far the 
change has been technical rather than human and moral, 
that it has been economic rather than adequately social. 
Put in the language of Bacon, this means that while 
we have been reasonably successful in obtaining com- 
mand of nature by means of science, our science is not 
yet such that this command is systematically and pre- 
eminently applied to the relief of human estate. Such 
applications occur and in great numbers, but they are 
incidental, sporadic and external. And this limita- 
tion defines the specific problem of philosophical re- 
construction at the present time. For it emphasizes 
the larger social deficiencies that require intelligent 
diagnosis, and projection of aims and methods. 

It is hardly necessary to remind you however that 
marked political changes have already followed upon the 
new science and its industrial applications, and that in 
so far some directions of social development have at 
least been marked out. The growth of the new technique 
of industry has everywhere been followed by the fall of 
feudal institutions, in which the social pattern was 
formed in agricultural occupations and military pur- 
suits. Wherever business in the modern sense has gone, 
the tendency has been to transfer power from land to 
financial capital, from the country to the city, from the 
farm to factory, from social titles based on personal 
allegiance, service and protection, to those based on 



44 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

control of labor and exchange of goods. The change 
in the political centre of gravity has resulted in emanci- 
pating the individual from bonds of class and custom 
and in producing a political organization which depends 
less upon superior authority and more upon voluntary 
choice. Modern states, in other words, are regarded 
less as divine, and more as human works than they 
used to be; less as necessary manifestations of some 
supreme and over-ruling principles, and more as con- 
trivances of men and women to realize their own desires. 
The contract theory of the origin of the state is a 
theory whose falsity may easily be demonstrated both 
philosophically and historically. Nevertheless this 
theory has had great currency and influence. In form, 
it stated that some time in the past men voluntarily got 
together and made a compact with one another to 
observe certain laws and to submit to certain authority 
and in that way brought the state and the relation of 
ruler and subject into existence. Like many things in 
philosophy, the theory, though worthless as a record 
of fact, is of great worth as a symptom of the direction 
of human desire. It testified to a growing belief that 
the state existed to satisfy human needs and could be 
shaped by human intention and volition. Aristotle's 
theory that the state exists by nature failed to satisfy 
the thought of the seventeenth century because it 
seemed by making the state a product of nature to re- 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 45 

move its constitution beyond human choice. Equally 
significant was the assumption of the contract theory 
that individuals by their personal decisions expressing 
their personal wishes bring the state into existence. The 
rapidity with which the theory gained a hold all over 
western Europe showed the extent to which the bonds 
of customary institutions had relaxed their grip. It 
proved that men had been so liberated from absorption 
in larger groups that they were conscious of themselves 
as individuals having rights and claims on their own 
account, not simply as members of a class, guild or 
social grade. 

Side by side with this political individualism went a 
religious and moral individualism. The metaphysical 
doctrine of the superiority of the species to the indi- 
vidual, of the permanent universal to the changing par- 
ticular, was the philosophic support of political and 
ecclesiastical institutionalism. The universal church 
was the ground, end and limit of the individual's beliefs 
and acts in spiritual matters, just as the feudal hier- 
archical organization was the basis, law and fixed limit 
of his behavior in secular affairs. The northern bar- 
barians had never completely come under the sway of 
classic ideas and customs. That which was indigenous 
where life was primarily derived from Latin sources 
was borrowed and more or less externally imposed in 
Germanic Europe. Protestantism marked the formal 



46 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

breaking away from the domination of Roman ideas. 
It effected liberation of individual conscience and wor- 
ship from control by an organized institution claiming 
to be permanent and universal. It cannot truly be said 
that at the outset the new religious movement went far 
in promoting freedom of thought and criticism, or in 
denying the notion of some supreme authority to which 
individual intelligence was absolutely in bonds. Nor at 
first did it go far in furthering tolerance or respect for 
divergency of moral and religious convictions. But 
practically it did tend to disintegration of established 
institutions. By multiplying sects and churches it en- 
couraged at least a negative toleration of the right of 
individuals to judge ultimate matters for themselves. In 
time, there developed a formulated belief in the sacred- 
ness of individual conscience and in the right to freedom 
of opinion, belief and worship. 

It is unnecessary to point out how the spread of this 
conviction increased political individualism, or how it 
accelerated the willingness of men to question received 
ideas in science and philosophy — to think and observe 
and experiment for themselves. Religious individualism 
served to supply a much needed sanction to initiative and 
independence of thought in all spheres, even when re- 
ligious movements officially were opposed to such free- 
dom when carried beyond a limited point. The greatest 
influence of Protestantism was, however, in developing 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 47 

the idea of the personality of every human being as an 
end in himself. When human beings were regarded as 
capable of direct relationship with God, without the 
intermediary of any organization like the Church, and 
the drama of sin, redemption and salvation was some- 
thing enacted within the innermost soul of individuals 
rather than in the species of which the individual was a 
subordinate part, a fatal blow was struck at all doc- 
trines which taught the subordination of personality — 
a blow which had many political reverberations in 
promoting democracy. For when in religion the idea of 
the intrinsic worth of every soul as such was proclaimed, 
it was difficult to keep the idea from spilling over, so to 
say, into secular relationships. 

The absurdity is obvious of trying in a few para- 
graphs to summarize movements in industry, politics and 
religion whose influence is still far from exhausted and 
about which hundreds and thousands of volumes have 
been written. But I shall count upon your forbearance 
to recall that these matters are alluded to only in order 
to suggest some of the forces that operated to mark out 
the channels in which new ideas ran. First, there is the 
transfer of interest from the eternal and universal to 
what is changing and specific, concrete — a movement 
that showed itself practically in carrying over of atten- 
tion and thought from another world to this, from the 
supernaturalism characteristic of the Middle Ages 



48 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

to delight in natural science, natural activity and 
natural intercourse. Secondly, there is the gradual 
decay of the authority of fixed institutions and class 
distinctions and relations, and a growing belief in the 
power of individual minds, guided by methods of obser- 
vation, experiment and reflection, to attain the truths 
needed for the guidance of life. The operations and 
results of natural inquiry gained in prestige and power 
at the expense of principles dictated from high 
authority. 

Consequently principles and alleged truths are 
judged more and more by criteria of their origin 
in experience and their consequences of weal and woe 
in experience, and less by criteria of sublime origin 
from beyond everyday experience and independent of 
fruits in experience. It is no longer enough for a princi- 
ple to be elevated, noble, universal and hallowed by time. 
It must present its birth certificate, it must show under 
just what conditions of human experience it was gen- 
erated, and it must justify itself by its works, present 
and potential. Such is the inner meaning of the modern 
appeal to experience as an ultimate criterion of value 
and validity. In the third place, great store is set 
upon the idea of progress. The future rather than the 
past dominates the imagination. The Golden Age lies 
ahead of us not behind us. Everywhere new possibilities 
beckon and arouse courage and effort. The great 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 49 

French thinkers of the later eighteenth century bor- 
rowed this idea from Bacon and developed it into the 
doctrine of the indefinite perfectibility of mankind on 
earth. Man is capable, if he will but exercise the re- 
quired courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his 
own fate. Physical conditions offer no insurmountable 
barriers. In the fourth place, the patient and experi- 
mental study of nature, bearing fruit in inventions 
which control nature and subdue her forces to social 
uses, is the method by which progress is made. Knowl- 
edge is power and knowledge is achieved by sending the 
mind to school to nature to learn her processes of 
change. 

In this lecture as in the previous one, I can hardly 
close better than by reference to the new responsibilities 
imposed upon philosophy and the new opportunities 
opened to it. Upon the whole, the greatest effect of 
these changes up to date has been to substitute an 
Idealism based on epistemology, or the theory of knowl- 
edge, for the Idealism based on the metaphysics of 
classic antiquity. 

Earlier modern philosophy (even though uncon- 
sciously to itself) had the problem of reconciling the 
traditional theory of the rational and ideal basis, stuff 
and end of the universe with the new interest in indi- 
vidual mind and the new confidence in its capacities. It 
was in a dilemma. On the one hand, it had no intention 



50 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

of losing itself in a materialism which subordinated man 
to physical existence and mind to matter — especially 
just at the moment when in actual affairs man and mind 
were beginning to achieve genuine rule over nature. 
On the other hand, the conception that the world as 
it stood was an embodiment of a fixed and comprehensive 
Mind or Reason was uncongenial to those whose main 
concern was with the deficiencies of the world and with 
an attempt to remedy them. The effect of the objective 
theological idealism that had developed out of classic 
metaphysical idealism was to make the mind submissive 
and acquiescent. The new individualism chafed under 
the restrictions imposed upon it by the notion of a uni- 
versal reason which had once and for all shaped nature 
and destiny. 

In breaking away from antique and medieval thought, 
accordingly, early modern thought continued the older 
tradition of a Reason that creates and constitutes the 
world, but combined it with the notion that this Reason 
operates through the human mind, individual or collec- 
tive. This is the common note of idealism sounded by 
all the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, whether belonging to the British school of 
Locke, Berkeley and Hume or the Continental school of 
Descartes. In Kant as everybody knows the two 
strains came together; and the theme of the formation 
of the knowable world by means of a thought that 



SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 51 

operated exclusively through the human knower became 
explicit. Idealism ceased to be metaphysical and cosmic 
in order to become epistemological and personal. 

It is evident that this development represents merely 
a transitional stage. It tried, after all, to put the new 
wine in the old bottles. It did not achieve a free and 
unbiased formulation of the meaning of the power to 
direct nature's forces through knowledge — that is, 
purposeful, experimental action acting to reshape be- 
liefs and institutions. The ancient tradition was still 
strong enough to project itself unconsciously into men's 
ways of thinking, and to hamper and compromise the 
expression of the really modern forces and aims. Es- 
sential philosophic reconstruction represents an attempt 
to state these causes and results in a way freed from 
incompatible inherited factors. It will regard intelli- 
gence not as the original shaper and final cause of 
things, but as the purposeful energetic re-shaper of 
those phases of nature and life that obstruct social 
well-being. It esteems the individual not as an exag- 
geratedly self-sufficient Ego which by some magic 
creates the world, but as the agent who is responsible 
through initiative, inventiveness and intelligently 
directed labor for re-creating the world, transforming 
it into an instrument and possession of intelligence. 

The train of ideas represented by the Baconian 
Knowledge is Power thus failed in getting an emanci- 



52 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

pated and independent expression. These become hope- 
lessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that 
embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with 
which they were completely incompatible. The ob- 
scurity, the confusion of modern philosophy is the 
product of this attempt to combine two things which 
cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally. 
Philosophic reconstruction for the present is thus the 
endeavor to undo the entanglement and to permit the 
Baconian aspirations to come to a free and un- 
hindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall 
consider the needed reconstruction as it affects certain 
classic philosophic antitheses, like those of experience 
and reason, the real and the ideal. But first we shall 
have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon 
philosophy by that changed conception of nature, ani- 
mate and inanimate, which we owe to the progress of 
science. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR IN RECONSTRUC- 
TION OF PHILOSOPHY 

Philosophy starts from some deep and wide way of 
responding to the difficulties life presents, but it grows 
only when material is at hand for making this practical 
response conscious, articulate and communicable. Ac- 
companying the economic, political and ecclesiastical 
changes which were alluded to in an earlier lecture, was 
a scientific revolution enormous in scope and leaving un- 
changed almost no detail of belief about nature, physical 
and human. In part this scientific transformation was 
produced by just the change in practical attitude and 
temper. But as it progressed, it furnished that change 
an appropriate vocabulary, congenial to its needs, and 
made it articulate. The advance of science in its larger 
generalizations and in its specific detail of fact supplied 
precisely that intellectual equipment of ideas and con- 
crete fact that was needed in order to formulate, 
precipitate, communicate and propagate the new dispo- 
sition. Today, accordingly, we shall deal with those 
contrasting conceptions of the structure and constitu- 
tion of Nature, which when they are accepted on the 

53 



54 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

authority of science (alleged or real), for the intel- 
lectual framework of philosophy. - 

Contrasting conceptions of ancient and modern 
science have been selected. For I see no way in which 
the truly philosophic import of the picture of the 
world painted by modern science can be appreciated 
except to exhibit it in contrast with that earlier picture 
which gave classic metaphysics its intellectual founda- 
tion and confirmation. The world in which philoso- 
phers once put their trust was a closed world, a world 
consisting internally of a limited number of fixed forms, 
and having definite boundaries externally. The world 
of modern science is an open world, a world varying in- 
definitely without the possibility of assignable limit in 
its internal make-up, a world stretching beyond any 
assignable bounds externally. Again, the world in 
which even the most intelligent men of olden times 
thought they lived was a fixed world, a realm where 
changes went on only within immutable limits of rest 
and permanence, and a world where the fixed and un- 
moving was, as we have already noted, higher in quality 
and authority than the moving and altering. And in 
the third place, the world which men once saw with 
their eyes, portrayed in their imaginations and re- 
peated in their plans of conduct, was a world of a 
limited number of classes, kinds, forms, distinct in 
quality (as kinds and species must be distinct) and 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 55 

arranged in a graded order of superiority and 
inferiority. 

It is not easy to recall the image of the universe which 
was taken for granted in the world tradition. In spite 
of its dramatic rendering (as in Dante), of the dialecti- 
cal elaborations of Aristotle and St. Thomas, in spite of 
the fact that it held men's minds captive until the last 
three hundred years, and that its overthrow involved a 
religious upheaval, it is already dim, faded and remote. 
Even as a separate and abstract thing of theory it is 
not easy to recover. 

As something pervasive, interwoven with all the de- 
tails of reflection and observation, with the plans and 
rules of behavior, it is impossible to call it back again. 
Yet, as best we can, we need to put before our minds a 
definitely enclosed universe, something which can be 
called a universe in a literal and visible sense, having the 
earth at its fixed and unchanging centre and at a 
fixed circumference the heavenly arch of fixed stars 
moving in an eternal round of divine ether, hemming in 
all things and keeping them forever at one and in order. 
The earth, though at the centre, is the coarsest, gross- 
est, most material, least significant and good (or per- 
fect) of the parts of this closed world. It is the scene 
of maximum fluctuation and vicissitude. It is the least 
rational, and therefore the least notable, or knowable; 
it offers the least to reward contemplation, provoke 



56 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

admiration and govern conduct. Between this grossly 
material centre and the immaterial, spiritual and eternal 
heavens lie a definite series of regions of moon, planets, 
sun, etc., each of which gains in rank, value, rationality 
and true being as it is farther from earth and nearer 
the heavens. Each of these regions is composed of its 
own appropriate stuff of earth, water, air, fire in its 
own dominant degree, until we reach the heavenly firma- 
ment which transcends all these principles, being con- 
stituted, as was just said, of that immaterial, inalterable 
energy called ether. 

Within this tight and pent in universe, changes take 
place of course. But they are only of a small number 
of fixed kinds ; and they operate only within fixed limits. 
Each kind of stuff has its own appropriate motion. It 
is the nature of earthly things to be heavy, since they 
are gross, and hence to move downward. Fire and 
superior things are light and hence move upward to 
their proper place; air rises only to the plane of the 
planets, where it then takes its back and forth motion 
which naturally belongs to it, as is evident in the winds 
and in respiration. Ether being the highest of all 
physical things has a purely circular movement. The 
daily return of the fixed stars is the closest possible 
approximation to eternity, and to the self-involved revo- 
lution of mind upon its own ideal axis of reason. Upon 
the earth in virtue of its earthly nature — or rather its 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 57 

lack of virtue — is a scene of mere change. Mere flux, 
aimless and meaningless, starts at no definite point and 
arrives at nothing, amounts to nothing. Mere changes 
of quantity, all purely mechanical changes, are of this 
kind. They are like the shiftings of the sands by the 
sea. They may be sensed, but they cannot be " noted " 
or understood ; they lack fixed limits which govern them. 
They are contemptible. They are casual, the sport of 
accident. 

Only changes which lead to some defined or fixed out- 
come of form are of any account and can have any 
account — any logos or reason — made of them. The 
growth of plants and animals illustrates the highest 
kind of change which is possible in the sublunary or 
mundane sphere. They go from one definite fixed form 
to another. Oaks generate only oaks, oysters only 
oysters, man only man. The material factor of 
mechanical production enters in, but enters in as acci- 
dent to prevent the full consummation of the type of the 
species, and to bring about the meaningless variations 
which diversify various oaks or oysters from one an- 
other; or in extreme cases to produce freaks, sports, 
monsters, three-handed or four-toed men. Aside from 
accidental and undesirable variations, each individual 
has a fixed career to pursue, a fixed path in which to 
travel. Terms which sound modern, words like poten- 
tiality and development abound in Aristotelian thought, 



58 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and have misled some into reading into his thought 
modern meanings. But the significance of these words 
in classic and medieval thought is rigidly determined by 
their context. Development holds merely of the course 
of changes which takes place within a particular mem- 
ber of the species. It is only a name for the prede- 
termined movement from the acorn to the oak tree. It 
takes place not in things generally but only in some 
one of the numerically insignificant members of the oak 
species. Development, evolution, never means, as in 
modern science, origin of new forms, a mutation from 
an old species, but only the monotonous traversing of a 
previously plotted cycle of change. So potentiality 
never means, as in modern life, the possibility of novelty, 
of invention, of radical deviation, but only that 
principle in virtue of which the acorn becomes the oak. 
Technically, it is the capacity for movement between 
opposites. Only the cold can become hot ; only the dry 
can become wet ; only the babe can become a man ; the 
seed the full-grown wheat and so on. Potentiality in- 
stead of implying the emergence of anything novel means 
merely the facility with which a particular thing re- 
peats the recurrent processes of its kind, and thus 
becomes a specific case of the eternal forms in and 
through which all things are constituted. 

In spite of the almost infinite numerical diversity of 
individuals, there are only a limited number of species, 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 59 

kinds or sorts. And the world is essentially a world 
which falls into sorts; it is pre-arranged into distinct 
classes. Moreover, just as we naturally arrange plants 
and animals into series, ranks and grades, from the 
lower to the highest, so with all things in the universe. 
The distinct classes to which things belong by their 
very nature form a hierarchical order. There are 
castes in nature. The universe is constituted on an 
aristocratic, one can truly say a feudal, plan. Species, 
classes do not mix or overlap — except in cases of acci- 
dent, and to the result of chaos. Otherwise, everything 
belongs in advance to a certain class, and the class has 
its own fixed place in the hierarchy of Being. The 
universe is indeed a tidy spot whose purity is interfered 
with only by those irregular changes in individuals 
which are due to the presence of an obdurate matter 
that refuses to yield itself wholly to rule and form. 
Otherwise it is a universe with a fixed place for every- 
thing and where everything knows its place, its station 
and class, and keeps it. Hence what are known techni- 
cally as final and formal causes are supreme, and 
efficient causes are relegated to an inferior place. The 
so-called final cause is just a name for the fact that 
there is some fixed form characteristic of a class or sort 
of things which governs the changes going on, so that 
they tend toward it as their end and goal, the fulfilment 
of their true nature. The supralunar region is the end 



60 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

or final cause of the proper movements of air and fire; 
the earth of the motions of crass, heavy things ; the oak 
of the acorn ; the mature form in general of the germi- 
nal. 

The " efficient cause," that which produces and in- 
stigates a movement is only some external change as 
it accidentally gives a kind of push to an immature, 
imperfect being and starts it moving toward its per- 
fected or fulfilled form. The final cause is the per- 
fected form regarded as the explanation or reason of 
prior changes. When it is not taken in reference to the 
changes completed and brought to rest in it, but in 
itself it is the " formal cause " : The inherent nature 
or character which " makes " or constitutes a thing 
what it is so far as it truly is, namely, what it is so far 
as it does not change. Logically and practically all of 
the traits which have been enumerated cohere. Attack 
one and you attack all. When any one is undermined, 
all go. This is the reason why the intellectual modifica- 
tion of the last few centuries may truly be called a 
revolution. It has substituted a conception of the world 
differing at every point. It makes little matter at what 
point you commence to trace the difference, you find 
yourself carried into all other points. 

Instead of a closed universe, science now presents us 
with one infinite in space and time, having no limits here 
or there, at this end, so to speak, or at that, and as 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 61 

infinitely complex in internal structure as it is infinite 
in extent. Hence it is also an open world, an infinitely 
variegated one, a world which in the old sense can 
hardly be called a universe at all; so multiplex and 
far-reaching that it cannot be summed up and grasped 
in any one formula. And change rather than fixity is 
now a measure of " reality ? ' or energy of being; change 
is omnipresent. The laws in which the modern man 
of science is interested are laws of motion, of generation 
and consequence. He speaks of law where the ancients 
spoke of kind and essence, because what he wants is a 
correlation of changes, an ability to detect one change 
occurring in correspondence with another. He does not 
try to define and delimit something remaining constant 
in change. Pie tries to describe a constant order of 
change. And while the word "constant" appears in 
both statements, the meaning of the word is not the 
same. In one case, we are dealing with something con- 
stant in existence, physical or metaphysical; in the 
other case, with something constant in fn/nction and 
operation. One is a form of independent being; the 
other is a formula of description and calculation of 
interdependent changes. 

In short, classic thought accepted a feudally 
arranged order of classes or kinds, each " holding " 
from a superior and in turn giving the rule of conduct 
and service to an inferior. This trait reflects and 



62 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

parallels most closely the social situation we were con- 
sidering at the last hour. We have a fairly definite 
notion of society as organized upon the feudal basis. 
The family principle, the principle of kinship is strong, 
and especially is this true as we ascend in the social 
scale. At the lower end, individuals may be lost more or 
less in the mass. Since all are parts of the common 
herd, there is nothing especial to distinguish their birth. 
But among the privileged and ruling class the case is 
quite different. The tie of kinship at once marks a group 
off externally and gives it distinction, and internally 
holds all its members together. Kinship, kind, class, 
genus are synonymous terms, starting from social and 
concrete facts and going to the technical and abstract. 
For kinship is a sign of a common nature, of something 
universal and permanent running through all particular 
individuals, and giving them a real and objective unity. 
Because such and such persons are kin they are really, 
and not merely conventionally, marked off into a class 
having something unique about it. All contemporary 
members are bound into an objective unity which in- 
cludes ancestors and descendants and excludes all who 
belong to another kin or kind. Assuredly this parcel- 
ling out of the world into separate kinds, each having 
its qualitatively distinct nature in contrast with other 
species, binding numerically distinct individuals to- 
gether, and preventing their diversities from exceeding 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 63 

fixed bounds, may without exaggeration be called a pro- 
jection of the family principle into the world at large. 

In a feudally organized society, moreover, each kin- 
ship group or species occupies a definite place. It is 
marked by the possession of a specific rank higher or 
lower with respect to other grades. This position con- 
fers upon it certain privileges, enabling it to enforce 
certain claims upon those lower in the scale and en- 
tailing upon it certain services and homage to be ren- 
dered to superiors. The relationship of causation, so 
to speak, is up and down. Influence, power, proceeds 
from above to below; the activities of the inferior are 
performed with respect, quite literally, to what is above. 
Action and reaction are far from being equal and in 
opposite directions. All action is of one sort, of the 
nature of lordship, and proceeds from the higher to 
the lower. Reaction is of the nature of subjection and 
deference and proceeds from lower to higher. The 
classic theory of the constitution of the world corre- 
sponds point by point to this ordering of classes in a 
scale of dignity and power. 

A third trait assigned by historians to feudalism is that 
the ordering of ranks centres about armed service and 
the relationship of armed defense and protection. I am 
afraid that what has already been said about the paral- 
lelism of ancient cosmology with social organization may 
seem a fanciful analogy; and if a comparison is also 



64 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

drawn in this last regard, there will be no doubt in 
your minds that a metaphor is being forced. Such is 
truly the case if we take the comparison too literally. 
But not so, if we confine our attention to the notion 
of rule and command implied in both. Attention has 
already been called to the meaning that is now given 
the term law — a constant relationship among changes. 
Nevertheless, we often hear about laws which " govern " 
events, and it often seems to be thought that phenomena 
would be utterly disorderly were there not laws to 
keep them in order. This way of thinking is a survival 
of reading social relationships into nature — not neces- 
sarily a feudal relationship, but the relation of ruler 
and ruled, sovereign and subject. Law is assimilated 
to a command or order. If the factor of personal will 
is eliminated (as it was in the best Greek thought) 
still the idea of law or universal is impregnated with the 
sense of a guiding and ruling influence exerted from 
above on what is naturally inferior to it. The universal 
governs as the end and model which the artisan has in 
mind " governs " his movements. The Middle Ages 
added to this Greek idea of control the idea of a 
command proceeding from a superior will; and hence 
thought of the operations of nature as if they were a 
fulfilment of a task set by one who had authority to 
direct action. 

The traits of the picture of nature drawn by modern 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 65 

science fairly spring by contrast into high relief. 
Modern science took its first step when daring astrono- 
mers abolished the distinction of high, sublime and ideal 
forces operating in the heavens from lower and material 
forces actuating terrestrial events. The supposed 
heterogeneity of substances and forces between heaven 
and earth was denied. It was asserted that the same 
laws hold everywhere, that there is homogeneity of 
material and process everywhere throughout nature. 
The remote and esthetically sublime is to be scientifically 
described and explained in terms of homely familiar 
events and forces. The material of direct handling and 
observation is that of which we are surest; it is the 
better known. Until we can convert the grosser and 
more superficial observations of far-away things in 
the heavens into elements identical with those of things 
directly at hand, they remain blind and not understood. 
Instead of presenting superior worth, they present only 
problems. They are not means of enlightenment but 
challenges. The earth is not superior in rank to sun, 
moon and stars, but it is equal in dignity, and its occur- 
rences give the key to the understanding of celestial 
existences. Being at hand, they are also capable of 
being brought under our hand; they can be manipu- 
lated, broken up, resolved into elements which can be 
managed, combined at will in old and new forms. The 
net result may be termed, I think, without any great 



66 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

forcing, the substitution of a democracy of individual 
facts equal in rank for the feudal system of an ordered 
gradation of general classes of unequal rank. 

One important incident of the new science was the 
destruction of the idea that the earth is the centre of 
the universe. When the idea of a fixed centre went, 
there went with it the idea of a closed universe and a 
circumscribing heavenly boundary. To the Greek sense, 
just because its theory of knowing was dominated by 
esthetic considerations, the finite was the perfect. 
Literally, the finite was the finished, the ended, the 
completed, that with no ragged edges and unaccountable 
operations. The infinite or limitless was lacking in 
character just because it was in-finite. Being every- 
thing, it was nothing. It was unformed and chaotic, 
uncontrolled and unruly, the source of incalculable 
deviations and accidents. Our present feeling that as- 
sociates infinity with boundless power, with capacity 
for expansion that knows no end, with the delight in a 
progress that has no external limit, would be incom- 
prehensible were it not that interest has shifted from 
the esthetic to the practical ; from interest in beholding 
a harmonious and complete scene to interest in trans- 
forming an inharmonious one. One has only to read 
the authors of the transition period, say Giordano 
Bruno, to realize what a pent-in, suffocating sensation 
they associated with a closed, finite world, and what a 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 67 

feeling of exhilaration, expansion and boundless pos- 
sibility was aroused in them by the thought of a world 
infinite in stretch of space and time, and composed 
internally of infinitesimal infinitely numerous elements. 
That which the Greeks withdrew from with repulsion 
they welcomed with an intoxicated sense of adventure. 
The infinite meant, it was true, something forever un- 
traversed even by thought, and hence something forever 
unknown — no matter how great attainment in learn- 
ing. But this " forever unknown " instead of being 
chilling and repelling was now an inspiring challenge 
to ever-renewed inquiry, and an assurance of inexhaust- 
ible possibilities of progress. 

The student of history knows well that the Greeks 
made great progress in the science of mechanics as well 
as of geometry. At first sight, it appears strange that 
with this advance in mechanics so little advance was 
made in the direction of modern science. The seeming 
paradox impels us to ask why it was that mechanics 
remained a separate science, why it was not used in 
description and explanation of natural phenomena after 
the manner of Galileo and Newton. The answer is 
found in the social parallelism already mentioned. 
Socially speaking, machines, tools, were devices em- 
ployed by artisans. The science of mechanics had to 
do with the kind of things employed by human mechan- 
ics, and mechanics were base fellow's. They were at the 



68 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

lower end of the social scale, and how could light on the 
heavens, the highest, be derived from them? The appli- 
cation of considerations of mechanics to natural 
phenomena would moreover have implied an interest in 
the practical control and utilization of phenomena 
which was totally incompatible with the importance 
attached to final causes as fixed determiners of nature. 
All the scientific reformers of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries strikingly agree in regarding the doc- 
trine of final causes as the cause of the failure of science. 
Why? Because this doctrine taught that the processes 
of nature are held in bondage to certain fixed ends which 
they must tend to realize. Nature was kept in lead- 
ing strings ; it was cramped down to production of a 
limited number of stereotyped results. Only a com- 
paratively small number of things could be brought 
into being, and these few must be similar to the ends 
which similar cycles of change had effected in the past. 
The scope of inquiry and understanding was limited to 
the narrow round of processes eventuating in the fixed 
ends which the observed world offered to view. At 
best, invention and production of new results by use of 
machines and tools must be restricted to articles of 
transient dignity and bodily, not intellectual, use. 

When the rigid clamp of fixed ends was taken off 
from nature, observation and imagination were emanci- 
pated, and experimental control for scientific and prac- 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 69 

tical purposes enormously stimulated. Because natural 
processes were no longer restricted to a fixed number 
of immovable ends or results, anything might conceiv- 
ably happen. It was only a question of what elements 
could be brought into juxtaposition so that they would 
work upon one another. Immediately, mechanics ceased 
to be a separate science and became an organ for at- 
tacking nature. The mechanics of the lever, wheel, pul- 
ley and inclined plane told accurately what happens 
when things in space are used to move one another 
during definite periods of time. The whole of nature 
became a scene of pushes and pulls, of cogs and levers, 
of motions of parts or elements to which the formulae 
of movements produced by well-known machines were 
directly applicable. 

The banishing of ends and forms from the universe 
has seemed to many an ideal and spiritual impoverish- 
ment. When nature was regarded as a set of mechanical 
interactions, it apparently lost all meaning and pur- 
pose. Its glory departed. Elimination of differences 
of quality deprived it of beauty. Denial to nature of 
all inherent longings and aspiring tendencies toward 
ideal ends removed nature and natural science from 
contact with poetry, religion and divine things. There 
seemed to be left only a harsh, brutal despiritualized 
exhibition of mechanical forces. As a consequence, it 
has seemed to many philosophers that one of their 



70 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

chief problems was to reconcile the existence of this 
purely mechanical world with belief in objective ration- 
ality and purpose — to save life from a degrading ma- 
terialism. Hence many sought to re-attain by way of 
an analysis of the process of knowing, or epistemology, 
that belief in the superiority of Ideal Being which had 
anciently been maintained on the basis of cosmology. 
But when it is recognized that the mechanical view is 
determined by the requirements of an experimental con- 
trol of natural energies, this problem of reconciliation 
no longer vexes us. Fixed forms and ends, let us recall, 
mark fixed limits to change. Hence they make futile all 
human efforts to produce and regulate change except 
within narrow and unimportant limits. They paralyze 
constructive human inventions by a theory which con- 
demns them in advance to failure. Human activity 
can conform only to ends already set by nature. It 
was not till ends were banished from nature that pur- 
poses became important as factors in human minds 
capable of reshaping existence. A natural world that 
does not subsist for the sake of realizing a fixed set of 
ends is relatively malleable and plastic ; it may be used 
for this end or that. That nature can be known through 
the application of mechanical formulae is the prime 
condition of turning it to human account. Tools, 
machines are means to be utilized. Only when nature is 
regarded as mechanical, is systematic invention and 



i 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 71 

construction of machines relevant to nature's activities. 
Nature is subdued to human purpose because it is no 
longer the slave of metaphysical and theological pur- 
pose. 

Bergson has pointed out that man might well be called 
Home Faber. He is distinguished as the tool-making 
animal. This has held good since man was man ; but 
till nature was construed in mechanical terms, the mak- 
ing of tools with which to attack and transform nature 
was sporadic and accidental. Under such circum- 
stances it would not have occurred even to a Bergson 
that man's tool-making capacity was so important and 
fundamental that it could be used to define him. The 
very things that make the nature of the mechanical- 
physical scientist esthetically blank and dull are the 
things which render nature amenable to human control. 
When qualities were subordinated to quantitative and 
mathematical relationships, color, music and form dis- 
appeared from the object of the scientist's inquiry as 
such. But the remaining properties of weight, exten- 
sion, numerable velocity of movement and so on were 
just the qualities which lent themselves to the substi- 
tution of one thing for another, to the conversion of one 
form of energy into another ; to the effecting of trans- 
formations. When chemical fertilizers can be used in 
place of animal manures, when improved grain and 
cattle can be purposefully bred from inferior animals 



72 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and grasses, when mechanical energy can be converted 
into heat and electricity into mechanical energy, man 
gains power to manipulate nature. Most of all he gains 
power to frame new ends and aims and to proceed in 
regular system to their actualization. Only indefinite 
substitution and convertibility regardless of quality 
render nature manageable. The mechanization of 
nature is the condition of a practical and progressive 
idealism in action. 

It thus turns out that the old, old dread and dislike 
of matter as something opposed to mind and threaten- 
ing it, to be kept within the narrowest bounds of 
recognition ; something to be denied so far as possible 
lest it encroach upon ideal purposes and finally exclude 
them from the real world, is as absurd practically as 
it was impotent intellectually. Judged from the only 
scientific standpoint, what it does and how it functions, 
matter means conditions. To respect matter means 
to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions 
which hinder and obstruct and which have to be changed, 
conditions which help and further and which can be 
used to modify obstructions and attain ends. Only as 
men have learned to pay sincere and persistent regard 
to matter, to the conditions upon which depends nega- 
tively and positively the success of all endeavor, have 
they shown sincere and fruitful respect for ends and 
purposes. To profess to have an aim and then neglect 



i 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 73 

the means of its execution is self-delusion of the most 
dangerous sort. Education and morals will begin to 
find themselves on the same road of advance that say 
chemical industry and medicine have found for them- 
selves when they too learn fully the lesson of whole- 
hearted and unremitting attention to means and condi- 
tions — that is, to what mankind so long despised as 
material and mechanical. When we take means for ends 
we indeed fall into moral materialism. But when we 
take ends without regard to means we degenerate into 
sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back 
upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation 
and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will 
force the realization of preconceived ends at any 
cost. 

I have touched in this lecture upon many things in 
a cursory way. Yet there has been but one point in 
mind. The revolution in our conceptions of nature and 
in our methods of knowing it has bred a new temper of 
imagination and aspiration. It has confirmed the new 
attitude generated by economic and political changes. 
It has supplied this attitude with definite intellectual 
material with which to formulate and justify itself. 

In the first lecture it was noted that in Greek life 
prosaic matter of fact or empirical knowledge was at 
a great disadvantage as compared with the imaginative 
beliefs that were bound up with special institutions 



74 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and moral habitudes. Now this empirical knowledge 
has grown till it has broken its low and limited sphere 
of application and esteem. It has itself become an 
organ of inspiring imagination through introducing 
ideas of boundless possibility, indefinite progress, free 
movement, equal opportunity irrespective of fixed limits. 
It has reshaped social institutions, and in so far de- 
veloped a new morale. It has achieved ideal values. 
It is convertible into creative and constructive philoso- 
phy. 

Convertible, however, rather than already converted. 
When we consider how deeply embedded in customs of 
thought and action the classic philosophy came to be 
and how congenial it is to man's more spontaneous be- 
liefs, the throes that attended its birth are not to be 
wondered at. We should rather wonder that a view so 
upsetting, so undermining, made its way without more 
persecutions, martyrdoms and disturbances. It cer- 
tainly is not surprising that its complete and consistent 
formulation in philosophy has been long delayed. The 
main efforts of thinkers were inevitably directed to 
minimizing the shock of change, easing the strains of 
transition, mediating and reconciling. When we look 
back upon almost all of the thinkers of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, upon all excepting those who 
were avowedly sceptical and revolutionary, what strikes 
us is the amount of traditional subject-matter and 



THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 75 

method that is to be found even among those who were 
regarded as most advanced. Men cannot easily throw 
off their old habits of thinking, and never can throw off 
all of them at once. In developing, teaching and re- 
ceiving new ideas we are compelled to use some of the 
old ones as tools of understanding and communication. 
Only piecemeal, step-by-step, could the full import of 
the new science be grasped. Roughly speaking, the 
seventeenth century witnessed its application in 
astronomy and general cosmology; the eighteenth cen- 
tury in physics and chemistry; the nineteenth century 
undertook an application in geology and the biological 
sciences. 

It was said that it has now become extremely dif- 
ficult to recover the view of the world which univer- 
sally obtained in Europe till the seventeenth century. 
Yet after all we need only recur to the science of plants 
and animals as it was before Darwin and to the ideas 
which even how are dominant in moral and political 
matters to find the older order of conceptions in full 
possession of the popular mind. Until the dogma of 
fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement 
in classes of higher and lower, of subordination of the 
transitory individual to the universal or kind had been 
shaken in its hold upon the science of life, it was im- 
possible that the new ideas and method should be made 
at home in social and moral life. Does it not seem to be 



76 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

the intellectual task of the twentieth century to take 
this last step? When this step is taken the circle of 
scientific development will be rounded out and the re- 
construction of philosophy be made an accomplished 
fact. 



CHAPTER IV 

CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE 
AND REASON 

What is experience and what is Reason, Mind? 
What is the scope of experience and what are its limits ? 
How far is it a sure ground of belief and a safe guide 
of conduct? Can we trust it in science and in be- 
havior? Or is it a quagmire as soon as we pass 
beyond a few low material interests? Is it so shaky, 
shifting, and shallow that instead of affording sure 
footing, safe paths to fertile fields, it misleads, betrays, 
and engulfs? Is a Reason outside experience and above 
it needed to supply assured principles to science and 
conduct? In one sense, these questions suggest tech- 
nical problems of abstruse philosophy ; in another sense, 
they contain the deepest possible questionings regard- 
ing the career of man. They concern the criteria he is 
to employ in forming his beliefs ; the principles by which 
he is to direct his life and the ends to which he is to 
direct it. Must man transcend experience by some 
organ of unique character that carries him into the 
super-empirical? Failing this, must he wander sceptical 
and disillusioned? Or is human experience itself worth 

77 



78 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

while in its purposes and its methods of guidance? Can 
it organize itself into stable courses or must it be sus- 
tained from without? 

We know the answers of traditional philosophy. 
They do not thoroughly agree among themselves, but 
they agree that experience never rises above the level of 
the particular, the contingent, and the probable. Only 
a power transcending in origin and content any and all 
\ conceivable experience can attain to universal, neces- 
sary and certain authority and direction. The em- 
piricists themselves admitted the correctness of these 
assertions. They only said that since there is no faculty 
of Pure Reason in the possession of mankind, we must 
put up with what we have, experience, and make the 
most possible out of it. They contented themselves with 
sceptical attacks upon the transcendentalist, with indi- 
cations of the ways in which we might best seize the 
meaning and good of the passing moment ; or like Locke, 
asserted that in spite of the limitation of experience, it 
affords the light needed to guide men's footsteps 
modestly in conduct. They affirmed that the alleged au- 
. thoritative guidance by a higher faculty had practically 
hampered men. 

It is the function of this lecture to show how and 
why it is now possible to make claims for experience as 
a guide in science and moral life which the older empiri- 
cists did not and could not make for it. 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 79 

Curiously enough, the key to the matter may be found 
in the fact that the old notion of experience was itself 
a product of experience — the only kind of experience 
which was then open to men. If another conception of 
experience is now possible, it is precisely because the 
quality of experience as it may now be lived has under- 
gone a profound social and intellectual change from 
that of earlier times. The account of experience which 
we find in Plato and Aristotle is an account of what 
Greek experience actually was. It agrees very closely 
with what the modern psychologist knows as the method 
of learning by trial and error as distinct from the 
method of learning by ideas. Men tried certain acts, 
they underwent certain sufferings and affections. Each 
of these in the time of its occurrence is isolated, particu- 
lar — its counterpart is transient appetite and transient 
sensation. But memory preserves and accumulates 
these separate incidents. As they pile up, irregular 
variations get cancelled, common features are selected, 
reinforced and combined. Gradually a habit of action is 
built up, and corresponding to this habit there forms a 
certain generalized picture of an object or situation. 
We come to know or note not merely this particular 
which as a particular cannot strictly be known at all 
(for not being classed it cannot be characterized and 
identified) but to recognize it as man, tree, stone, leather 
— an individual of a certain kind, marked by a certain 



80 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

[ 
universal form characteristic of a whole species of thing. 

Along with the development of this common-sense 
knowledge, there grows up a certain regularity of con- 
duct. The particular incidents fuse, and a way of act- 
ing which is general, as far as it goes, builds up. The 
skill develops which is shown by the artisan, the shoe- 
maker, the carpenter, the gymnast, the physician, who 
have regular ways of handling cases. This regularity 
signifies, of course, that the particular case is not 
treated as an isolated particular, but as one of a kind, 
which therefore demands a kind of action. From the 
multitude of particular illnesses encountered, the physi- 
cian in learning to class some of them as indigestion 
learns also to treat the cases of the class in a common 
or general way. He forms the rule of recommending a 
certain diet, and prescribing a certain remedy. All this 
forms what we call experience. It results, as the illus- 
tration shows, in a certain general insight and a certain 
organized ability in action. 

But needless to insist, the generality and the organi- 
zation are restricted and fallible. They hold, as Aris- 
totle was fond of pointing out, usually, in most cases, 
as a rule, but not universally, of necessity, or as a 
principle. The physician is bound to make mistakes, 
because individual cases are bound to vary unaccount- 
ably : such is their very nature. The difficulty does not 
arise in a defective experience which is capable of 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 81 

remedy in some better experience. Experience itself, as 
such, is defective, and hence default is inevitable and 
irremediable. The only universality and certainty is in 
a region above experience, that of the rational and con- 
ceptual. As the particular was a stepping-stone to 
image and habit, so the latter may become a stepping- 
stone to conceptions and principles. But the latter 
leave experience behind, untouched ; they do not react 
to rectify it. Such is the notion which still lingers in 
the contrast of " empirical " and " rational " as when 
we say that a certain architect or physician is empirical, 
not scientific in his procedures. But the difference be- 
tween the classic and the modern notion of experience 
is revealed in the fact that such a statement is now a 
charge, a disparaging accusation, brought against a 
particular architect or physician. With Plato, Aris- 
totle and the Scholastic, it was a charge against the 
callings, since they were modes of experience. It was 
an indictment of all practical action in contrast with 
conceptual contemplation. 

The modern philosopher who has professed himself 
an empiricist has usually had a critical purpose in mind. 
Like Bacon, Locke, Condillac and Helvetius, he stood 
face to face with a body of beliefs and a set of institu- 
tions in which he profoundly disbelieved. His problem 
was the problem of attack upon so much dead weight 
carried uselessly by humanity, crushing and distorting 



82 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

it. His readiest way of undermining and disintegrating 
was by appealing to experience as a final test and cri- 
terion. In every case, active reformers were " empiri- 
cists " in the philosophical sense. They made it their 
business to show that some current belief or institution 
that claimed the sanction of innate ideas or necessary 
conceptions, or an origin in an authoritative revela- 
tion of reason, had in fact proceeded from a lowly origin 
in experience, and had been confirmed by accident, by 
class interest or by biased authority. 

The philosophic empiricism initiated by Locke was 
thus disintegrative in intent. It optimistically took it 
for granted that when the burden of blind custom, im- 
posed authority, and accidental associations was re- 
moved, progress in science and social organization would 
spontaneously take place. Its part was to help in re- 
moving the burden. The best way to liberate men 
from the burden was through a natural history of the 
origin and growth in the mind of the ideas connected 
with objectionable beliefs and customs. Santayana 
justly calls the psychology of this school a malicious 
psychology. It tended to identify the history of the 
formation of certain ideas with an account of the things 
to which the ideas refer — an identification which natu- 
rally had an unfavorable effect on the things. But 
Mr. Santayana neglects to notice the social zeal and aim 
latent in the malice. He fails to point out that this 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 83 

" malice " was aimed at institutions and traditions 
which had lost their usefulness ; he fails to point out 
that to a large extent it was true of them that an 
account of their psychological origin was equivalent to 
a destructive account of the things themselves. But 
after Hume with debonair clarity pointed out that 
the analysis of beliefs into sensations and associations 
left " natural " ideas and institutions in the same posi- 
tion in which the reformers had placed " artificial " 
ones, the situation changed. The rationalists employed 
the logic of sensationalistic-empiricism to show that ex- 
perience, giving only a heap of chaotic and isolated par- 
ticulars, is as fatal to science and to moral laws and 
obligations as to obnoxious institutions ; and concluded 
that " Reason " must be resorted to if experience was 
to be furnished with any binding and connecting princi- 
ples. The new rationalistic idealism of Kant and 
his successors seemed to be necessitated by the 
totally destructive results of the new empirical 
philosophy. 

Two things have rendered possible a new conception 
of experience and a new conception of the relation of 
reason to experience, or, more accurately, of the place 
of reason in experience. The primary factor is the 
change that has taken place in the actual nature of 
experience, its contents and methods, as it is actually 
lived. The other k the development of a psychology 



84 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

based upon biology which makes possible a new scien- 
tific formulation of the nature of experience. 

Let us begin with the technical side — the change in 
psychology. We are only just now commencing to ap- 
preciate how completely exploded is the psychology that 
dominated philosophy throughout the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries. According to this theory, mental 
life originated in sensations which are separately and 
passively received, and which are formed, through laws 
of retention and association, into a mosaic of images, 
perceptions, and conceptions. The senses were regarded 
as gateways or avenues of knowledge. Except in com- 
bining atomic sensations, the mind was wholly passive 
and acquiescent in knowing. Volition, action, emotion, 
and desire follow in the wake of sensations and images. 
The intellectual or cognitive factor comes first and emo- 
tional and volitional life is only a consequent conjunc- 
tion of ideas with sensations of pleasure and pain. 

The effect of the development of biology has been to 
reverse the picture. Wherever there is life, there is be- 
havior, activity. In order that life may persist, this 
activity has to be both continuous and adapted to the 
environment. This adaptive adjustment, moreover, is 
not wholly passive ; is not a mere matter of the mould- 
ing of the organism by the environment. Even a clam 
acts upon the environment and modifies it to some ex- 
tent. It selects materials for food and for the shell that 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 85 

protects it. It does something to the environment as 
well as has something done to itself. There is no such 
thing in a living creature as mere conformity to con- 
ditions, though parasitic forms may approach this limit. 
In the interests of the maintenance of life there is trans- 
formation of some elements in the surrounding medium. 
The higher the form of life, the more important is the 
active reconstruction of the medium. This increased 
control may be illustrated by the contrast of savage 
with civilized man. Suppose the two are living in a 
wilderness. With the savage there is the maximum of 
accommodation to given conditions; the minimum of 
what we may call hitting back. The savage takes things 
" as they are," and by using caves and roots and oc- 
casional pools leads a meagre and precarious existence. 
The civilized man goes to distant mountains and dams 
streams. He builds reservoirs, digs channels, and con- 
ducts the waters to what had been a desert. He 
searches the world to find plants and animals that will 
thrive. He takes native plants and by selection and 
cross-fertilization improves them. He introduces ma- 
chinery to till the soil and care for the harvest. By 
such means he may succeed in making the wilderness 
blossom like the rose. 

Such transformation scenes are so familiar that we 
overlook their meaning. We forget that the inherent 
power of life is illustrated in them. Note what a change 



86 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

this point of view entails in the traditional notions of 
experience. Experience becomes an affair primarily of 
doing. The organism does not stand about, Micawber- 
like, waiting for something to turn up. It does not wait 
passive and inert for something to impress itself upon 
it from without. The organism acts in accordance with 
its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surround- 
ings. As a consequence the changes produced in the 
environment react upon the organism and its activities. 
The living creature undergoes, suffers, the consequences 
of its own behavior. This close connection between 
doing and suffering or undergoing forms what we call 
experience. Disconnected doing and disconnected suf- 
fering are neither of them experiences. Suppose fire 
encroaches upon a man when he is asleep. Part of his 
body is burned away. The burn does not perceptibly 
result from what he has done. There is nothing which 
in any instructive way can be named experience. Or 
again there is a series of mere activities, like twitchings 
of muscles in a spasm. The movements amount to noth- 
ing; they have no consequences for life. Or, if they 
have, these consequences are not connected with prior 
doing. There is no experience, no learning, no cumu- 
lative process. But suppose a busy infant puts his 
finger in the fire ; the doing is random, aimless, without 
intention or reflection. But something happens in con- 
sequence. The child undergoes heat, he suffers pain. 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 87 

The doing and undergoing, the reaching and the burn, 
are connected. One comes to suggest and mean the 
other. Then there is experience in a vital and signifi- 
cant sense. 

Certain important implications for philosophy follow. 
In the first place, the interaction of organism and en- 
vironment, resulting in some adaptation which secures 
utilization of the latter, is the primary fact, the basic 
category. Knowledge is relegated to a derived posi- 
tion, secondary in origin, even if its importance, when 
once it is established, is overshadowing. Knowledge is 
not something separate and self-sufficing, but is in- 
volved in the process by which life is sustained and 
evolved. The senses lose their place as gateways of 
knowing to take their rightful place as stimuli to action. 
To an animal an affection of the eye or ear is not an 
idle piece of information about something indifferently 
going on in the world. It is an invitation and induce- 
ment to act in a needed way. It is a clue in behavior, 
a directive factor in adaptation of life in its surround- 
ings. It is urgent not cognitive in quality. The whole 
controversy between empiricism and rationalism as to 
the intellectual worth of sensations is rendered strangely 
obsolete. The discussion of sensations belongs under the 
head of immediate stimulus and response, not under the 
head of knowledge. 

As a conscious element, a sensation marks an inter- 



88 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ruption in a course of action previously entered upon. 
Many psychologists since the time of Hobbes have 
dwelt upon what they call the relativity of sensations. 
We feel or sense cold in transition from warmth rather 
than absolutely; hardness is sensed upon a background 
of less resistance; a color in contrast with pure light 
or pure dark or in contrast with some other hue. A 
continuously unchanged tone or color cannot be at- 
tended to or sensed. What we take to be such monoto- 
nously prolonged sensations are in truth constantly in- 
terrupted by incursions of other elements, and represent 
a series of excursions back and forth. This fact was, 
however, misconstrued into a doctrine about the nature 
of knowledge. Rationalists used it to discredit sense as 
a valid or high mode of knowing things, since accord- 
ing to it we never get hold of anything in itself or 
intrinsically. Sensationalists used it to disparage all 
pretence at absolute knowledge. 

Properly speaking, however, this fact of the rela- 
tivity of sensation does not in the least belong in the 
sphere of knowing. Sensations of this sort are emo- 
tional and practical rather than cognitive and intel- 
lectual. They are shocks of change, due to interruption 
of a prior adjustment. They are signals to redirections 
of action. Let me take a trivial illustration. The 
person who is taking notes has no sensation of the pres- 
sure of his pencil on the paper or on his hand as long 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 89 

as it functions properly. It operates merely as stimulus 
to ready and effective adjustment. The sensory activity 
incites automatically and unconsciously its proper 
motor response. There is a preformed physiological 
connection, acquired from habit but ultimately going 
back to an original connection in the nervous system. 
If the pencil-point gets broken or too blunt and the 
habit of writing does not operate smoothly, there is a 
conscious shock: — the feeling of something the matter, 
something gone wrong. This emotional change operates 
as a stimulus to a needed change in operation. One 
looks at his pencil, sharpens it or takes another pencil 
from one's pocket. The sensation operates as a pivot 
of readjusting behavior. It marks a break in the 
prior routine of writing and the beginning of some other 
mode of action. Sensations are " relative " in the sense 
of marking transitions in habits of behavior from one 
course to another way of behaving. 

The rationalist was thus right in denying that sensa- 
tions as such are true elements of knowledge. But the 
reasons he gave for this conclusion and the consequences 
he drew from it were all wrong. Sensations are not 
parts of any knowledge, good or bad, superior or in- 
ferior, imperfect or complete. They are rather provo- 
cations, incitements, challenges to an act of inquiry 
which is to terminate in knowledge. They are not ways 
of knowing things inferior in value to reflective ways, to 



90 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

the ways that require thought and inference, because 
they are not ways of knowing at all. They are stimuli 
to reflection and inference. As interruptions, they raise 
the questions: What does this shock mean? What is 
happening? What is the matter? How is my relation 
to the environment disturbed? What should be done 
about it ? How shall I alter my course of action to 
meet the change that has taken place in the surround- 
ings? How shall I readjust my behavior in response? 
Sensation is thus, as the sensationalist claimed, the be- 
ginning of knowledge, but only in the sense that the 
experienced shock of change is the necessary stimulus 
to the investigating and comparing which eventually 
produce knowledge. 

When experience is aligned with the life-process and 
sensations are seen to be points of readjustment, the 
alleged atomism of sensations totally disappears. With 
this disappearance is abolished the need for a synthetic 
faculty of super-empirical reason to connect them. 
Philosophy is not any longer confronted with the hope- 
less problem of finding a way in which separate grains 
of sand may be woven into a strong and coherent rope 
— or into the illusion and pretence of one. When the 
isolated and simple existences of Locke and Hume are 
seen not to be truly empirical at all but to answer to 
certain demands of their theory of mind, the necessity 
ceases for the elaborate Kantian and Post-Kantian ma- 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 91 

chinery of a priori concepts and categories to synthe- 
size the alleged stuff of experience. The true " stuff " 
of experience is recognized to be adaptive courses of 
action, habits, active functions, connections of doing 
and undergoing; sensori-motor co-ordinations. Experi- 
ence carries principles of connection and organization 
within itself.- These principles are none the worse be- 
cause they are vital and practical rather than epistemo- 
logical. Some degree of organization is indispensable to 
even the lowest grade of life. Even an amoeba must 
have some continuity in time in its activity and some 
adaptation to its environment in space. Its life and 
experience cannot possibly consist in momentary, 
atomic, and self-enclosed sensations. Its activity has 
reference to its surroundings and to what goes before 
and what comes after. This organization intrinsic to 
life renders unnecessary a super-natural and super-em- 
pirical synthesis. It affords the basis and material for 
a positive evolution of intelligence as an organizing 
factor within experience. 

Nor is it entirely aside from the subject to point 
out the extent in which social as well as biological 
organization enters into the formation of human ex- 
perience. Probably one thing that strengthened the idea 
that the mind is passive and receptive in knowing was 
the observation of the helplessness of the human infant. 
But the observation points in quite another direction. 



92 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

Because of his physical dependence and impotency, the 
contacts of the little child with nature are mediated by 
other persons. Mother and nurse, father and older 
children, determine what experiences the child shall 
have ; they constantly instruct him as to the meaning of 
what he does and undergoes. The conceptions that are 
socially current and important become the child's prin- 
ciples of interpretation and estimation long before he 
attains to personal and deliberate control of conduct. 
Things come to him clothed in language, not in physical 
nakedness, and this garb of communication makes him 
a sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These be- 
liefs coming to him as so many facts form his mind ; they 
furnish the centres about which his own personal expe- 
ditions and perceptions are ordered. Here we have 
" categories " of connection and unification as impor- 
tant as those of Kant, but empirical not mythological. 
From these elementary, if somewhat technical con- 
siderations, we turn to the change which experience it- 
self has undergone in the passage from ancient and 
medieval to modern life. To Plato, experience meant 
enslavement to the past, to custom. Experience was 
almost equivalent to established customs formed not by 
reason or under intelligent control but by repetition 
and blind rule of thumb. Only reason can lift us above 
subjection to the accidents of the past. When we come 
to Bacon and his successors, we discover a curious re- 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 93 

versal. Reason and its bodyguard of general notions 
is now the conservative, mind-enslaving factor. Ex- 
perience is the liberating power. Experience means the 
new, that which calls us away from adherence to the 
past, that which reveals novel facts and truths. Faith 
in experience produces not devotion to custom but en- 
deavor for progress. This difference in temper is the 
more significant because it was so unconsciously taken 
for granted. Some concrete and vital change must have 
occurred in actual experience as that is lived. For, 
after all, the thought of experience follows after and 
is modelled upon the experience actually undergone. 
When mathematics and other rational sciences de- 
veloped among the Greeks, scientific truths did not 
react back into daily experience. They remained 
isolated, apart and super-imposed. Medicine was the 
art in which perhaps the greatest amount of posi- 
tive knowledge was obtained, but it did not reach 
the dignity of science. It remained an art. In 
practical arts, moreover, there was no conscious in- 
vention or purposeful improvement* Workers fol- 
lowed patterns that were handed down to them, while 
departure from established standards and models 
usually resulted in degenerate productions. Im- 
provements came either from a slow, gradual, and un- 
acknowledged accumulation of changes or else from 
some sudden inspiration, which at once set a new stand- 



94 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ard. Being the result of no conscious method, it was 
fittingly attributed to the gods. In the social arts, 
such a radical reformer as Plato felt that existing evils 
were due to the absence of such fixed patterns as con- 
trolled the productions of artisans. The ethical pur- 
port of philosophy was to furnish them, and when once 
they were instituted, they were to be consecrated by 
religion, adorned by art, inculcated by education and 
enforced by magistrates so that alteration of them would 
be impossible. 

It is unnecessary to repeat what has been so often 
dwelt upon as to the effect of experimental science in 
enabling man to effect a deliberate control of his en- 
vironment. But since the impact of this control upon 
the traditional notion of experience is often overlooked, 
we must point out that when experience ceased to be 
empirical and became experimental, something of radi- 
cal importance occurred. Aforetime man employed the 
results of his prior experience only to form customs 
that henceforth had to be blindly followed or blindly 
broken. Now, old experience is used to suggest aims 
and methods for developing a new and improved ex- 
perience. Consequently experience becomes in so far 
constructively self-regulative. What Shakespeare, so 
pregnantly said of nature, it is " made better by no 
mean, but nature makes that mean," becomes true of 
experience. We do not merely have to repeat the past, 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 95 

or wait for accidents to force change upon us. We use 
our past experiences to construct new and better ones 
in the future. The very fact of experience thus includes 
the process by which it directs itself in its own better- 
ment. 

Science, " reason " is not therefore something laid 
from above upon experience. Suggested and tested in 
experience, it is also employed through inventions in a 
thousand ways to expand and enrich experience. Al- 
though, as has been so often repeated, this self-creation 
and self-regulation of experience is still largely techno- 
logical rather than truly artistic or human, yet what 
has been achieved contains the guaranty of the possi- 
bility of an intelligent administering of experience. The 
limits are moral and intellectual, due to defects in our 
good will and knowledge. They are not inherent meta- 
physically in the very nature of experience. " Reason '| 
as a faculty separate from experience, introducing us to 
a superior region of universal truths begins now to 
strike us as remote, uninteresting and unimportant. 
Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality 
and regularity into experience, strikes us more and 
more as superfluous — the unnecessary creation of men 
addicted to traditional formalism and to elaborate 
terminology. Concrete suggestions arising from past 
experiences, developed and matured in the light of the 
needs and deficiencies of the present, employed as aims 



96 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

land methods of specific reconstruction, and tested by 
' success or failure in accomplishing this task of re- 
adjustment, suffice. To such empirical suggestions used 
in constructive fashion for new ends the name intelli- 
gence is given. 

This recognition of the place of active and planning 
thought within the very processes of experience radi- 
cally alters the traditional status of the technical prob- 
lems of particular and universal, sense and reason, per- 
ceptual and conceptual. But the alteration is of much 
more than technical significance. For reason is experi- 
mental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of 
science, and used in the creation of social arts ; it has 
something to do. It liberates man from the bondage of 
the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into 
custom. It projects a better future and assists man in 
its realization. And its operation is always subject to 
test in experience. The plans which are formed, the 
principles which man projects as guides of reconstruc- 
tive action, are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to 
be worked out in practice, and to be rejected, corrected 
and expanded as they fail or succeed in giving our 
present experience the guidance it requires. We may 
call them programmes of action, but since they are to be 
used in making our future acts less blind, more directed, 
they are flexible. Intelligence is not something pos- 
sessed once for all. It is in constant process of form- 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 97 

ing, and its retention requires constant alertness in 
observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn 
and courage in re-adjustment. 

In contrast with this experimental and re-adjusting 
intelligence, it must be said that Reason as employed by 
historic rationalism has tended to carelessness, conceit, 
irresponsibility, and rigidity — in short absolutism. A 
certain school of contemporary psychology uses the 
term " rationalization " to denote those mental mechan- 
isms by which we unconsciously put a better face on our 
conduct or experience than facts justify. We excuse 
ourselves to ourselves by introducing a purpose and 
order into that of which we are secretly ashamed. In 
like fashion, historic rationalism has often tended to 
use Reason as an agency of justification and apologet- 
ics. It has taught that the defects and evils of actual 
experience disappear in the " rational whole " of things ; 
that things appear evil merely because of the partial, 
incomplete nature of experience. Or, as was noted by 
Bacon, " reason " assumes a false simplicity, uniform- 
ity and universality, and opens for science a path of 
fictitious ease. This course results in intellectual irre- 
sponsibility and neglect: — irresponsibility because ra- 
tionalism assumes that the concepts of reason are so 
self-sufficient and so far above experience that they 
need and can secure no confirmation in experience. Neg- 
lect, because this same assumption makes men care- 



98 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

less about concrete observations and experiments. Con- 
tempt for experience has had a tragic revenge in ex- 
perience ; it has cultivated disregard for fact and this 
disregard has been paid for in failure, sorrow and war. 

The dogmatic rigidity of Rationalism is best seen in 
the consequences of Kant's attempt to buttress an other- 
wise chaotic experience with pure concepts. He set 
out with a laudable attempt at restricting the extrava- 
gant pretensions of Reason apart from experience. He 
called his philosophy critical. But because he taught 
that the understanding employs fixed, a priori, concepts, 
in order to introduce connection into experience and 
thereby make known objects possible (stable, regular 
relationships of qualities), he developed in German 
thought a curious contempt for the living variety of 
experience and a curious overestimate of the value of 
system, order, regularity for their own sakes. More 
practical causes were at work in producing the 
peculiarly German regard for drill, discipline, " order " 
and docility. 

But Kant's philosophy served to provide an intel- 
lectual justification or "rationalization" of subordi- 
nation of individuals to fixed and ready-made uni- 
versal, " principles," laws. Reason and law were held 
to be synonyms. And as reason came into experi- 
ence from without and above, so law had to come into 
life from some external and superior authority. The 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 99 

practical correlate to absolutism is rigidity, stiffness, 
inflexibility of disposition. When Kant taught that 
some conceptions, and these the important ones, are a 
priori, that they do not arise in experience and cannot 
be verified or tested in experience, that without such 
ready-made injections into experience the latter is 
anarchic and chaotic, he fostered the spirit of 
absolutism, even though technically he denied the possi- 
bility of absolutes. His successors were true to his spirit 
rather than his letter, and so they taught absolutism 
systematically. That the Germans with all their scien- 
tific competency and technological proficiency should 
have fallen into their tragically rigid and " superior " 
style of thought and action (tragic because involving 
them in inability to understand the world in which they 
lived) is a sufficient lesson of what may be involved in a 
systematical denial of the experimental character of 
intelligence and its conceptions. 

By common consent, the effect of English empiricism 
was sceptical where that of German rationalism was 
apologetic ; it undermined where the latter justified. It 
detected accidental associations formed into customs 
under the influence of self- or class-interest where 
German rational-idealism discovered profound meanings 
due to the necessary evolution of absolute reason. The 
modern world has suffered because in so many matters 
philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice be- 



100 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

tween hard and fast opposities : Disintegrating analysis 
or rigid synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and 
attacking the historic past as trivial and v harmful, or 
complete conservatism idealizing institutions as embodi- 
ments of eternal reason ; a resolution of experience into 
atomic elements that afford no support to stable or- 
ganization or a clamping down of all experience by 
fixed categories and necessary concepts — these are 
the alternatives that conflicting schools have pre- 
sented. 

They are the logical consequences of the traditional 
opposition of Sense and Thought, Experience and 
Reason. Common sense has refused to follow both 
theories to their ultimate logic, and has fallen back on 
faith, intuition or the exigencies of practical com- 
promise. But common sense too often has been con- 
fused and hampered instead of enlightened and directed 
by the philosophies proffered it by professional in- 
tellectuals. Men who are thrown back upon " common 
sense " when they appeal to philosophy for some general 
guidance are likely to fall back on routine, the force of 
some personality, strong leadership or on the pressure 
of momentary circumstances. It would be difficult to 
estimate the harm that has resulted because the liberal 
and progressive movement of the eighteenth and earlier 
nineteenth centuries had no method of intellectual articu- 
lation commensurate with its practical aspirations. Its 



EXPERIENCE AND REASON 101 

heart was in the right place. It was humane and social 
in intention. But it had no theoretical instrumentali- 
ties of constructive power. Its head was sadly deficient. 
Too often the logical import of its professed doctrines 
was almost anti-social in their atomistic individualism, 
anti-human in devotion to brute sensation. This de- 
ficiency played into the hands of the reactionary and 
obscurantist. The strong point of the appeal to fixed 
principles transcending experience, to dogmas incapable 
of experimental verification, the strong point of reliance 
upon a priori canons of truth and standards of morals 
in opposition to dependence upon fruits and conse- 
quences in experience, has been the unimaginative con- 
ception of experience which professed philosophic 
empiricists have entertained and taught. 

A philosophic reconstruction which should relieve men 
of having to choose between an impoverished and trun- 
cated experience on one hand and an artificial and im- 
potent reason on the other would relieve human effort 
from the heaviest intellectual burden it has to carry. 
It would destroy the division of men of good will into 
two hostile camps. It would permit the co-operation 
of those who respect the past and the institutionally 
established with those who are interested in establishing 
a freer and happier future. For it would determine 
the conditions under which the funded experience of the 
past and the contriving intelligence which looks to the 



102 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

future can effectually interact with each other. It 
would enable men to glorify the claims of reason without 
at the same time falling into a paralyzing worship of 
super-empirical authority or into an offensive " ration- 
alization " of things as they are. 



CHAPTER V 

CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF THE IDEAL AND 
THE REAL 

It has been noted that human experience is made 
human through the existence of associations and recol- 
lections, which are strained through the mesh of imagi- 
nation so as to suit the demands of the emotions. A 
life that is humanly interesting is, short of the results 
of discipline, a life in which the tedium of vacant leisure 
is filled with images that excite and satisfy. It is in 
this sense that poetry preceded prose in human experi- 
ence, religion antedated science, and ornamental and 
decorative art while it could not take the place of utility 
early reached a development out of proportion to the 
practical arts. In order to give contentment and de- 
light, in order to feed present emotion and give the 
stream of conscious life intensity and color, the sug- 
gestions w T hich spring from past experiences are worked 
over so as to smooth out their unpleasantnesses and en- 
hance their enjoyableness. Some psychologists claim, 
that there is what they call a natural tendency to 
obliviscence of the disagreeable — that men turn from 
the unpleasant in thought and recollection as they do 

103 



104 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

from the obnoxious in action. Every serious-minded 
person knows that a large part of the effort required in 
moral discipline consists in the courage needed to 
acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past 
and present acts. We squirm, dodge, evade, disguise, 
cover up, find excuses and palliations — anything to 
render the mental scene less uncongenial. In short, the 
tendency of spontaneous suggestion is to idealize ex- 
perience, to give it in consciousness qualities which it 
does not have in actuality. Time and memory are true 
artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's 
desire. 

As imagination becomes freer and less controlled by 
concrete actualities, the idealizing tendency takes fur- 
ther flights unrestrained by the rein of the prosaic 
world. The things most emphasized in imagination as 
it reshapes experience are things which are absent in 
reality. In the degree in which life is placid and easy, 
imagination is sluggish and bovine. In the degree in 
which life is uneasy and troubled, fancy is stirred to 
frame pictures of a contrary state of things. By 
reading the characteristic features of any man's castles 
in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his under- 
lying desires which are frustrated. What is difficulty 
and disappointment in real life becomes conspicuous 
achievement and triumph in revery ; what is negative in 
fact will be positive in the image drawn by fancy ; what 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 105 

is vexation in conduct will be compensated for in high 
relief in idealizing imagination. 

These considerations apply beyond mere personal 
psychology. They are decisive for one of the most 
marked traits of classic philosophy: — its conception of 
an ultimate supreme Reality which is essentially ideal 
in nature. Historians have more than once drawn an 
instructive parallel between the developed Olympian 
Pantheon of Greek religion and the Ideal Realm of 
Platonic philosophy. The gods, whatever their origin 
and original traits, became idealized projections of the 
selected and matured achievements which the Greeks 
admired among their mortal selves. The gods were 
like mortals, but mortals living only the lives which 
men would wish to live, with power intensified, beauty 
perfected, and wisdom ripened. When Aristotle criti- 
cized the theory of Ideas of his master, Plato, by saying 
that the Ideas were after all only things of sense eternal- 
ized, he pointed out in effect the parallelism of philoso- 
phy with religion and art to which allusion has just 
been made. And save for matters of merely technical 
import, is it not possible to say of Aristotle's Forms 
just what he said of Plato's Ideas? What are they, 
these Forms and Essences which so profoundly influ- 
enced for centuries the course of science and theology, 
save the objects of ordinary experience with their blem- 
ishes removed, their imperfections eliminated, their lacks 



106 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

rounded out, their suggestions and hints fulfilled? 
What are they in short but the objects of familiar life 
divinized because reshaped by the idealizing imagina- 
tion to meet the demands of desire in just those respects 
in which actual experience is disappointing? 

That Plato, and Aristotle in somewhat different 
fashion, and Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius and Saint 
Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza and Hegel all taught 
that Ultimate Reality is either perfectly Ideal and 
Rational in nature, or else has absolute ideality and 
rationality as its necessary attribute, are facts well 
known to the student of philosophy. They need no ex- 
position here. But it is worth pointing out that these 
great systematic philosophies defined perfect Ideality 
in conceptions that express the opposite of those things 
which make life unsatisfactory and troublesome. What 
is the chief source of the complaint of poet and moralist 
with the goods, the values and satisfactions of experi- 
ence? Rarely is the complaint that such things do not 
exist; it is that although existing they are momentary, 
transient, fleeting. They do not stay; at worst they 
come only to annoy and tease with their hurried and dis- 
appearing taste of what might be ; at best they come 
only to inspire and instruct with a passing hint of truer 
reality. This commonplace of the poet and moralist 
as to the impermanence not only of sensuous enjoy- 
ment, but of fame and civic achievements was profoundly 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 107 

reflected upon by philosophers, especially by Plato and 
Aristotle. The results of their thinking have been 
wrought into the very fabric of western ideas. Time, 
change, movement are signs that what the Greeks called 
Non-Being somehow infect true Being. The phrase- 
ology is now strange, but many a modern who ridicules 
the conception of Non-Being repeats the same thought 
under the name of the Finite or Imperfect. 

Wherever there is change, there is instability, and in- 
stability is proof of something the matter, of absence, 
deficiency, incompleteness. These are the ideas com- 
mon to the connection between change, becoming and 
perishing, and Non-Being, finitude and imperfection. 
Hence complete and true Reality must be changeless, 
unalterable, so full of Being that it always and for- 
ever maintains itself in fixed rest and repose. As 
Bradley, the most dialectially ingenious Absolutist of 
our own day, expresses the doctrine " Nothing that is 
perfectly real moves." And while Plato took, compara- 
tively speaking, a pessimistic view of change as mere 
lapse and Aristotle a complacent view of it as tendency 
to realization, yet Aristotle doubted no more than Plato 
* that the fully realized reality, the divine and ultimate, is / 
changeless. Though it is called Activity or Energy, the 
Activity knew no change, the energy did nothing. It 
was the activity of an army forever marking time and 
never going anywhere. 



108 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

From this contrast of the permanent with the tran- 
sient arise other features which mark off the Ultimate 
Reality from the imperfect realities of practical life. 
Where there is change, there is of necessity numerical 
plurality, multiplicity, and from variety comes opposi- 
tion, strife. Change is alteration, or " othering " and 
this means diversity. Diversity means division, and 
division means two sides and their conflict. The world 
which is transient must be a world of discord, for in 
lacking stability it lacks the government of unity. Did 
unity completely rule, these would remain an unchang- 
ing totality. What alters has parts and partialities 
which, not recognizing the rule of unity, assert them- 
selves independently and make life a scene of contention 
and discord. Ultimate and true Being on the other 
hand, since it is changeless is Total, All-Comprehensive 
and One. Since it is One, it knows only harmony, and 
therefore enjoys complete and eternal Good. It is 
Perfection. 

Degrees of knowledge and truth correspond with de- 
grees of reality point by point. The higher and more 
complete the Reality the truer and more important the 
knowledge that refers to it. Since the world of be- 
coming, of origins and perishings, is deficient in true 
Being, it cannot be known in the best sense. To know it 
means to neglect its flux and alteration and discover 
some permanent form which limits the processes that 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 109 

alter in time. The acorn undergoes a series of changes ; 
these are knowable only in reference to the fixed form 
of the oak which is the same in the entire oak species in 
spite of the numerical diversity of trees. Moreover, this 
form limits the flux of growth at both ends, the acorn 
coming from the oak as well as passing into it. Where 
such unifying and limiting eternal forms cannot be de- 
tected, there is mere aimless variation and fluctuation, 
and knowledge is out of the question. On the other 
hand, as objects are approached in which there is no 
movement at all, knowledge becomes really demonstra- 
tive, certain, perfect — truth pure and unalloyed. The 
heavens can be more truly known than the earth, God 
the unmoved mover than the heavens. 

From this fact follows the superiority of contempla- 
tive to practical knowledge, of pure theoretical specula- 
tion to experimentation, and to any kind of knowing 
that depends upon changes in things or that induces 
change in them. Pure knowing is pure beholding, view- 
ing, noting. It is complete in itself. It looks for 
nothing beyond itself ; it lacks nothing and hence has no 
aim or purpose. It is most emphatically its own excuse 
for being. Indeed, pure contemplative knowing is so 
much the most truly self-enclosed and self-sufficient 
thing in the universe that it is the highest and indeed 
the only attribute that can be ascribed to God, the 
Highest Being in the scale of Being. Man himself is 



110 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

divine in the rare moments when he attains to purely 
self-sufficient theoretical insight. 

In contrast with such knowing, the so-called knowing 
of the artisan is base. He has to bring about changes 
in things, in wood and stone, and this fact is of itself 
evidence that his material is deficient in Being. What 
condemns his knowledge even more is the fact that it is 
not disinterestedly for its own sake. It has reference to 
results to be attained, food, clothing, shelter, etc. It 
is concerned with things that perish, the body and its 
needs. It thus has an ulterior aim, and one which itself 
testifies to imperfection. For want, desire, affection of 
every sort, indicate lack. Where there is need and 
desire — as in the case of all practical knowledge and 
activity — there is incompleteness and insufficiency. 
While civic or political and moral knowledge rank 
higher than do the conceptions of the artisan, yet in- 
trinsically considered they are a low and untrue type. 
Moral and political action is practical; that is, it im- 
plies needs and effort to satisfy them. It has an end 
beyond itself. Moreover, the very fact of association 
shows lack of self-sufficiency ; it shows dependence upon 
others. Pure knowing is alone solitary, and capable of 
being carried on in complete, self-sufficing independence. 

In short, the measure of the worth of knowledge ac- 
cording to Aristotle, whose views are here summarized, 
is the degree in which it is purely contemplative. The 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 111 

highest degree is attained in knowing ultimate Ideal 
Being, pure Mind. This is Ideal, the Form of Forms, 
because it has no lacks, no needs, and experiences no 
change or variety. It has no desires because in it all 
desires are consummated. Since it is perfect Being, it 
is perfect Mind and perfect Bliss ; — the acme of ration- 
ality and ideality. One point more and the argument 
is completed. The kind of knowing that concerns itself 
with this ultimate reality (which is also ultimate 
ideality) is philosophy. Philosophy is therefore the last 
and highest term in pure contemplation. Whatever 
may be said for any other kind of knowledge, philos- 
ophy is self-enclosed. It has nothing to do beyond 
itself; it has no aim or purpose or function — except to 
be philosophy— that is, pure, self-sufficing beholding of 
ultimate reality. There is of course such a thing as 
philosophic study which falls short of this perfection. 
Where there is learning, there is change and becoming. 
But the function of study and learning of philosophy is, 
as Plato put it, to convert the eye of the soul from 
dwelling contentedly upon the images of things, upon 
the inferior realities that are born and that decay, 
and to lead it to the intuition of supernal and eternal 
Being. Thus the mind of the knower is transformed. 
It becomes assimilated to what it knows. 

Through a variety of channels, especially Neo- 
Platonism and St. Augustine, these ideas found their 



112 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

way into Christian theology; and great scholastic 
thinkers taught that the end of man is to know True 
Being, that knowledge is contemplative, that True Being 
is pure Immaterial Mind, and to know it is Bliss and 
Salvation. While this knowledge cannot be achieved 
in this stage of life nor without supernatural aid, yet so 
far as it is accomplished it assimilates the human mind 
to the divine essence and so constitutes salvation. 
Through this taking over of the conception of knowl- 
edge as Contemplative into the dominant religion of 
Europe, multitudes were affected who were totally inno- 
cent of theoretical philosophy. There was bequeathed 
to generations of thinkers as an unquestioned axiom the 
idea that knowledge is intrinsically a mere beholding 
or viewing of reality — the spectator conception of 
knowledge. So deeply engrained was this idea that it 
prevailed for centuries after the actual progress of 
science had demonstrated that knowledge is power to 
transform the world, and centuries after the practice 
of effective knowledge had adopted the method of 
experimentation. 

Let us turn abruptly from this conception of the 
measure of true knowledge and the nature of true philos- 
ophy to the existing practice of knowledge. Nowa- 
days if a man, say a physicist or chemist, wants to 
know something, the last thing he does is merely to con- 
template. He does not look in however earnest and 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 113 

prolonged way upon the object expecting that thereby 
he will detect its fixed and characteristic form. He does 
not expect any amount of such aloof scrutiny to reveal 
to him any secrets. He proceeds to do something, to 
bring some energy to bear upon the substance to see 
how it reacts; he places it under unusual conditions in 
order to induce some change. While the astronomer 
cannot change the remote stars, even he no longer merely 
gazes. If he cannot change the stars themselves, he can 
at least by lens and prism change their light as it 
reaches the earth; he can lay traps for discovering 
changes which would otherwise escape notice. Instead 
of taking an antagonistic attitude toward change and 
denying it to the stars because of their divinity and 
perfection, he is on constant and alert watch to find 
some change through which he can form an inference 
as to the formation of stars and systems of stars. 

Change in short is no longer looked upon as a fall 
from grace, as a lapse from reality or a sign of im- 
perfection of Being. Modern science no longer tries 
to find some fixed form or essence behind each process 
of change. Rather, the experimental method tries to 
break down apparent fixities and to induce changes. 
The form that remains unchanged to sense, the form of 
seed or tree, is regarded not as the key to knowledge 
of the thing, but as a wall, an obstruction to be broken 
down. Consequently the scientific man experiments with 



114 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

this and that agency applied to this and that condition 
until something begins to happen ; until there is, as we 
say, something doing. He assumes that there is change 
going on all the time, that there is movement within 
each thing in seeming repose ; and that since the process 
is veiled from perception the way to know it is to bring 
the thing into novel circumstances until change becomes 
evident. In short, the thing which is to be accepted and 
paid heed to is not what is originally given but that 
which emerges after the thing has been set under a 
great variety of circumstances in order to see how it 
behaves. 

Now this marks a much more general change in the 
human attitude than perhaps appears at first sight. 
It signifies nothing less than that the world or any 
part of it as it presents itself at a given time is accepted 
or acquiesced in only as material for change. It is 
accepted precisely as the carpenter, say, accepts things 
as he finds them. If he took them as things to be 
observed and noted for their own sake, he never would 
be a carpenter. He would observe, describe, record tho 
structures, forms and changes which things exhibit to 
him, and leave the matter there. If perchance some of 
the changes going on should present him with a shelter, 
so much the better. But what makes the carpenter a 
builder is the fact that he notes things not just as 
objects in themselves, but with reference to what he 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 115 

wants to do to them and with them; to the end he 
has in mind. Fitness to effect certain special changes 
that he wishes to see accomplished is what concerns 
him in the wood and stones and iron which he observes. 
His attention is directed to the changes they undergo 
and the changes they make other things undergo so that 
he may select that combination of changes which will 
yield him his desired result. It is only by these processes 
of active manipulation of things in order to realize his 
purpose that he discovers what the properties of things 
are. If he foregoes his own purpose and in the name 
of a meek and humble subscription to things as they 
" really are " refuses to bend things as they " are " 
to his own purpose, he not only never achieves his pur- 
pose but he never learns what the things themselves are. 
They are what they can do and what can be done with 
them, — things that can be found by deliberate trying. 

The outcome of this idea of the right way to know 
is a profound modification in man's attitude toward the 
natural world. Under differing social conditions, the 
older or classic conception sometimes bred resignation 
and submission; sometimes Gontempt and desire to 
escape; sometimes, notably in the case of the Greeks, 
a keen esthetic curiosity which showed itself in acute 
noting of all the traits of given objects. In fact, the 
whole conception of knowledge as beholding and noting 
is fundamentally an idea connected with esthetic enjoy- 



; 



116 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ment and appreciation where the environment is beauti- 
ful and life is serene, and with esthetic repulsion and 
depreciation where life is troubled, nature morose and 
hard. But in the degree in which the active conception 
of knowledge prevails, and the environment is regarded 
as something that has to be changed in order to be truly 
known, men are imbued with courage, with what may 
almost be termed an aggressive attitude toward na- 
ture. The latter becomes plastic, something to be sub- 
jected to human uses. The moral disposition toward 
change is deeply modified. This loses its pathos, it 
ceases to be haunted with melancholy through suggest- 
ing only decay and loss. Change becomes significant 
of new possibilities and ends to be attained ; it becomes 
prophetic of a better future. Change is associated with 
progress rather than with lapse and fall. Since changes 
are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough 
about them so that we be able to lay hold of them and 
turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions 
and events are neither to be fled from nor passively 
acquiesced in ; they are to be utilized and directed. They 
are either obstacles to our ends or else means for their 
accomplishment. In a profound sense knowing ceases 
to be contemplative and becomes practical. 

Unfortunately men, educated men, cultivated men in 
particular, are still so dominated by the older concep- 
tion of an aloof and self-sufficing reason and knowledge 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 117 

that they refuse to perceive the import of this doctrine. 
They think they are sustaining the cause of impartial, 
thorough-going and disinterested reflection when they 
maintain the traditional philosophy of intellectualism — 
that is, of knowing as something self-sufficing and self- 
enclosed. But in truth, historic intellectualism, the 
spectator view of knowledge, is a purely compensatory 
doctrine which men of an intellectual turn have built 
up to console themselves for the actual and social im- 
potency of the calling of thought to which they are 
devoted. Forbidden by conditions and held back by 
lack of courage from making their knowledge a factor 
in the determination of the course of events, they have 
sought a refuge of complacency in the notion that know- 
ing is something too sublime to be contaminated by con- 
tact with things of change and practice. They have 
transformed knowing into a morally irresponsible 
estheticism. The true import of the doctrine of the 
operative or practical character of knowing, of intelli- 
gence, is objective. It means that the structures and 
objects which science and philosophy set up in contrast 
to the things and events of concrete daily experience 
do not constitute a realm apart in which rational con- 
templation may rest satisfied ; it means that they repre- 
sent the selected obstacles, material means and ideal 
methods of giving direction to that change which is 
bound to occur anyway. 



118 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

This change of human disposition toward the world 
does not mean that man ceases to have ideals, or ceases 
to be primarily a creature of the imagination. But it 
does signify a radical change in the character and 
function of the ideal realm which man shapes for him- 
self. In the classic philosophy, the ideal world is essen- 
tially a haven in which man" finds rest from the storms 
of life; it is an asylum in which he takes refuge from 
the troubles of existence with the calm assurance that 
it alone is supremely real. When the belief that knowl- 
edge is active and operative takes hold of men, the ideal 
realm is no longer something aloof and separate; it is 
rather that collection of imagined possibilities that 
stimulates men to new efforts and realizations. It still 
remains true that the troubles which men undergo are 
the forces that lead them to project pictures of a better 
state of things. But the picture of the better is shaped 
so that it may become an instrumentality of action, 
while in the classic view the Idea belongs ready-made in 
a noumenal world. Hence, it is only an object of 
personal aspiration or consolation, while to the modern, 
an idea is a suggestion of something to be done or of 
a way of doing. 

An illustration will, perhaps, make the difference 
clear. Distance is an obstacle, a source of trouble. It 
separates friends and prevents intercourse. It isolates, 
and makes contact and mutual understanding difficult. 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 119 

This state of affairs provokes discontent and restless- 
ness ; it excites the imagination to construct pictures of 
a state of things where human intercourse is not in- 
juriously affected by space. Now there are two ways 
out. One way is to pass from a mere dream of some 
heavenly realm in which distance is abolished and by 
some magic all friends are in perpetual transparent 
communication, to pass, I say, from some idle castle- 
building to philosophic reflection. Space, distance, it 
will then be argued, is merely phenomenal ; or, in a more 
modern version, subjective. It is not, metaphysically 
speaking, real. Hence the obstruction and trouble it 
gives is not after all " real " in the metaphysical sense 
of reality. Pure minds, pure spirits, do not live in a 
space world ; for them distance is not. Their relation- 
ships in the true world are not in any way affected by 
special considerations. Their intercommunication is 
direct, fluent, unobstructed. 

Does the illustration involve a caricature of ways of 
philosophizing with which we are all familiar? But if 
it is not an absurd caricature, does it not suggest that 
much of what philosophies have taught about the ideal 
and noumenal or superiorly real world, is after all, only 
casting a dream into an elaborate dialectic form 
through the use of a speciously scientific terminology? 
Practically, the difficulty, the trouble, remains. Practi- 
cally, however it may be " metaphysically," space is 



120 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

still real: — it acts in a definite objectionable way. 
Again, man dreams of some better state of things* 
From troublesome fact he takes refuge in fantasy. 
But this time, the refuge does not remain a permanent 
and remote asylum. 

The idea becomes a standpoint from which to examine 
existing occurrences and to see if there is not among 
them something which gives a hint of how communica- 
tion at a distance can be effected, something to be 
utilized as a medium of speech at long range. The sug- 
gestion or fancy though still ideal is treated as a 
possibility capable of realization in the concrete natural 
world, not as a superior reality apart from that world. 
As such, it becomes a platform from which to scrutinize 
natural events. Observed from the point of view of this 
possibility, things disclose properties hitherto unde- 
tected. In the light of these ascertainments, the idea 
of some agency for speech at a distance becomes less 
vague and floating: it takes on positive form. This 
action and reaction goes on. The possibility or idea is 
employed as a method for observing actual existence; 
and in the light of what is discovered the possibility 
takes on concrete existence. It becomes less of a mere 
idea, a fancy, a wished-for possibility, and more of an 
actual fact. Invention proceeds, and at last we have 
the telegraph, the telephone, first through wires, and 
then with no artificial medium. The concrete environ- 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 121 

ment is transformed in the desired direction; it is 
idealized in fact and not merely in fancy. The ideal is 
realized through its own use as a tool or method of 
inspection, experimentation, selection and combination 
of concrete natural operations. 

Let us pause to take stock of results. The division 
of the world into two kinds of Being, one superior, 
accessible only to reason and ideal in nature, the other 
inferior, material, changeable, empirical, accessible to 
sense-observation, turns inevitably into the idea that 
knowledge is contemplative in nature. It assumes a 
contrast between theory and practice which was all to 
the disadvantage of the latter. But in the actual course 
of the development of science, a tremendous change has 
come about. When the practice of knowledge ceased to 
be dialectical and became experimental, knowing became 
preoccupied with changes and the test of knowledge be- 
came the ability to bring about certain changes. Know- 
ing, for the axperimental sciences, means a certain kind 
of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be con- 
templative and becomes in a true sense practical. Now 
this implies that philosophy, unless it is to undergo a 
complete break with the authorized spirit of science, 
must also alter its nature. It must assume a practical 
nature; it must become operative and experimental. 
And we have pointed out what an enormous change this 
transformation of philosophy entails in the two con- 



122 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ceptions which have played the greatest role in historic 
philosophizing — the conceptions of the " real " and 
" ideal " respectively. The former ceases to be some- 
thing ready-made and final ; it becomes that which has 
to be accepted as the material of change, as the obstruc- 
tions and the means of certain specific desired changes. 
The ideal and rational also ceased to be a separate 
ready-made world incapable of being used as a lever to 
transform the actual empirical world, a mere asylum 
from empirical deficiencies. They represent intelligently 
thought-out possibilities of the existent world which may 
be used as methods for making over and improving it. 
Philosophically speaking, this is the great difference 
involved in the change from knowledge and philosophy 
as contemplative to operative. The change does not 
mean the lowering in dignity of philosophy from a lofty 
plane to one of gross utilitarianism. It signifies that 
the prime function of philosophy is that of rationaliz- 
ing the possibilities of experience, especially collective 
human experience. The scope of this change may be 
realized by considering how far we are from accomplish- 
ing it. In spite of inventions which enable men to use 
the energies of nature for their purposes, we are still 
far from habitually treating knowledge as the method 
of active control of nature and of experience. We tend 
to think of it after the model of a spectator viewing a 
finished picture rather than after that of the artist 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 123 

producing the painting. Thus there arise all the ques- 
tions of epistemology with which the technical student 
of philosophy is so familiar, and which have made 
modern philosophy in especial so remote from the under- 
standing of the everyday person and from the results 
and processes of science. For these questions all spring 
from the assumption of a merely beholding mind on 
one side and a foreign and remote object to be viewed 
and noted on the other. They ask how a mind and 
world, subject and object, so separate and independent 
can by any possibility come into such relationship to 
each other as to make true knowledge possible. If 
knowing were habitually conceived of as active and 
operative, after the analogy of experiment guided by 
hypothesis, or of invention guided by the imagination 
of some possibility, it is not too much to say that the 
first effect would be to emancipate philosophy from all 
the epistemological puzzles which now perplex it. For 
these all arise from a conception of the relation of mind 
and world, subject and object, in knowing, which as- 
sumes that to know is to seize upon what is already 
in existence. 

Modern philosophic thought has been so preoccupied 
with these puzzles of epistemology and the disputes 
between realist and idealist, between phenomenalist and 
absolutist, that many students are at a loss to know 
what would be left for philosophy if there were removed 



124 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

both the metaphysical task of distinguishing between the 
noumenal and phenomenal worlds and the epistemologi- 
cal task of telling how a separate subject can know an 
independent object. But would not the elimination of 
these traditional problems permit philosophy to devote 
itself to a more fruitful and more needed task? Would 
it not encourage philosophy to face the great social and 
moral defects and troubles from which humanity suffers, 
to concentrate its attention upon clearing up the causes 
and exact nature of these evils and upon developing a 
clear idea of better social possibilities ; in short upon 
projecting an idea or ideal which, instead of expressing 
the notion of another world or some far-away unrealiz- 
able goal, would be used as a method of understanding 
and rectifying specific social ills? 

This is a vague statement. But note in the first 
place that such a conception of the proper province of 
philosophy where it is released from vain metaphysics 
and idle epistemology is in line with the origin of phi- 
losophy sketched in the first hour. And in the second 
place, note how contemporary society, the world over, 
is in need of more general and fundamental enlighten- 
ment and guidance than it now possesses. I have tried 
to show that a radical change of the conception of 
knowledge from contemplative to active is the inevitable 
result of the way in which inquiry and invention are 
now conducted. But in claiming this, it must also be 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 125 

conceded, or rather asserted, that so far the change has 
influenced for the most part only the more technical 
side of human life. The sciences have created new in- 
dustrial arts. Man's physical command of natural 
energies has been indefinitely multiplied. There is con- 
trol of the sources of material wealth and prosperity. 
What would once have been miracles are now daily 
performed with steam and coal and electricity and air, 
and with the human body. But there are few persons 
optimistic enough to declare that any similar command 
of the forces which control man's social and moral wel- 
fare has been achieved. 

Where is the moral progress that corresponds to 
our economic accomplishments? The latter is the 
direct fruit of the revolution that has been wrought 
in physical science. But where is there a correspond- 
ing human science and art? Not only has the im- 
provement in the method of knowing remained so far 
mainly limited to technical and economic matters, 
but this progress has brought with it serious new moral 
disturbances. I need only cite the late war, the problem 
of capital and labor, the relation of economic classes, 
the fact that while the new science has achieved wonders 
in medicine and surgery, it has also produced and spread 
occasions for diseases and weaknesses. These consider- 
ations indicate to us how undeveloped are our politics, 
how crude and primitive our education, how passive and 



126 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

inert our morals. The causes remain which brought 
philosophy into existence as an attempt to find an in- 
telligent substitute for blind custom and blind impulse 
as guides to life and conduct. The attempt has not 
been successfully accomplished. Is there not reason for 
believing that the release of philosophy from its burden 
of sterile metaphysics and sterile epistemology instead 
of depriving philosophy of problems and subject-matter 
would open a way to questions of the most perplexing 
and the most significant sort? 

Let me specify one problem quite directly suggested 
by certain points in this lecture. It has been pointed 
out that the really fruitful application of the contem- 
plative idea was not in science but in the esthetic field. 
It is difficult to imagine any high development of the 
fine arts except where there is curious and loving in- 
terest in forms and motions of the world quite irrespec- 
tive of any use to which they may be put. And it is 
not too much to say that every people that has attained 
a high esthetic development has been a people in which 
the contemplative attitude has flourished — as the Greek, 
the Hindoo, the medieval Christian. On the other hand, 
the scientific attitude that has actually proved itself in 
scientific progress is, as has been pointed out, a prac- 
tical attitude. It takes forms as disguises for hidden 
processes. Its interest in change is in what it leads to, 
what can be done with it, to what use it can be put. 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 127 

While it has brought nature under control, there is 
something hard and aggressive in its attitude toward 
nature unfavorable to the esthetic enjoyment of the 
world. Surely there is no more significant question be- 
fore the world than this question of the possibility and 
method of reconciliation of the attitudes of practical 
science and contemplative esthetic appreciation. With- 
out the former, man will be the sport and victim of 
natural forces which he cannot use or control. With- 
out the latter, mankind might become a race of economic 
monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature 
and with one another, bored with leisure or capable of 
putting it to use only in ostentatious display and ex- 
travagant dissipation. 

Like other moral questions, this matter is social and 
even political. The western peoples advanced earlier 
on the path of experimental science and its applica- 
tions in control of nature than the oriental. It is not, 
I suppose wholly fanciful, to believe that the latter have 
embodied in their habits of life more of the contempla- 
tive, esthetic and speculatively religious temper, and 
the former more of the scientific, industrial and practi- 
cal. This difference and others which have grown up 
around it is one barrier to easy mutual understanding, 
and one source of misunderstanding. The philosophy 
which, then, makes a serious effort to comprehend these 
respective attitudes in their relation and due balance, 



128 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

could hardly fail to promote the capacity of peoples to 
profit by one another's experience and to co-operate 
more effectually with one another in the tasks of fruit- 
ful culture. 

Indeed, it is incredible that the question of the rela- 
tion of the " real " and the " ideal " should ever have 
been thought to be a problem belonging distinctively to 
philosophy. The very fact that this most serious of 
all human issues has been taken possession of by philos- 
ophy is only another proof of the disasters that follow 
in the wake of regarding knowledge and intellect as 
something self-sufficient. Never have the " real " and 
the " ideal " been so clamorous, so self-assertive, as at 
the present time. And never in the history of the world 
have they been so far apart. The world war was car- 
ried on for purely ideal ends : — for humanity, justice 
and equal liberty for strong and weak alike. And it 
was carried on by realistic means of applied science, by 
high explosives, and bombing airplanes and blockading 
marvels of mechanism that reduced the world well nigh 
to ruin, so that the serious-minded are concerned for 
the perpetuity of those choice values we call civiliza- 
tion. The peace settlement is loudly proclaimed in 
the name of the ideals that stir man's deepest emo- 
tions, but with the most realistic attention to details of 
economic advantage distributed in proportion to physi- 
cal power to create future disturbances. 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 129 

It is not surprising that some men are brought to 
regard all idealism as a mere smoke-screen behind which 
the search for material profit may be more effectually 
carried on, and are converted to the materialistic inter- 
pretation of history. " Reality " is then conceived as 
physical force and as sensations of power, profit and 
enjoyment; any politics that takes account of other 
factors, save as elements of clever propaganda and for 
control of those human beings who have not become 
realistically enlightened, is based on illusions. But 
others are equally sure that the real lesson of the war 
is that humanity took its first great wrong step when 
it entered upon a cultivation of physical science and 
an application of the fruits of science to the improve- 
ment of the instruments of life — industry and com- 
merce. They will sigh for the return of the day when, 
while the great mass died as they were born in animal 
fashion, the few elect devoted themselves not to science 
and the material decencies and comforts of existence 
but to " ideal " things, the things of the spirit. 

Yet the most obvious conclusion would seem to be 
the impotency and the harmfulness of any and every 
ideal that is proclaimed wholesale and in the abstract, 
that is, as something in itself apart from the detailed 
concrete existences whose moving possibilities it em- 
bodies. The true moral would seem to lie in en- 
forcing the tragedy of that idealism which believes 



130 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

in a spiritual world which exists in and by itself, 
and the tragic need for the most realistic study 
of forces and consequences, a study conducted in a 
more scientifically accurate and complete manner than 
that of the professed Real-politik. For it is not truly 
realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the 
future to immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces 
that are disagreeable and to magnify the enduring 
quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It 
is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence 
of ideals ; they spring from wrong ideals. And these 
wrong ideals have in turn their foundation in the absence 
in social matters of that methodic, systematic, impar- 
tial, critical, searching inquiry into " real " and opera- 
tive conditions which we call science and which has 
brought man in the technical realm to the command 
of physical energies. 

Philosophy, let it be repeated, cannot " solve " the 
problem of the relation of the ideal and the real. That 
is the standing problem of life. But it can at least 
lighten the burden of humanity in dealing with the 
problem by emancipating mankind from the errors 
which philosophy has itself fostered — the existence of 
conditions which are real apart from their movement 
into something new and different, and the existence of 
ideals, spirit and reason independent of the possi- 
bilities of the material and physical. For as long 



THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 131 

as humanity is committed to this radically false bias, 
it will walk forward with blinded eyes and bound limbs. 
And philosophy can effect, if it will, something more than 
this negative task. It can make it easier for mankind 
to take the right steps in action by making it clear that 
a sympathetic and integral intelligence brought to bear 
upon the observation and understanding of concrete 
social events and forces, can form ideals, that is aims, 
which shall not be either illusions or mere emotional 
compensations. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOGICAL RECON- 
STRUCTION 

Logic — like philosophy itself — suffers from a curious 
oscillation. It is elevated into the supreme and legisla- 
tive science only to fall into the trivial estate of keeper 
of such statements as A is A and the scholastic verses 
for the syllogistic rules. It claims power to state the 
laws of the ultimate structure of the universe, on the 
ground that it deals with the laws of thought which are 
the laws according to which Reason has formed the 
world. Then it limits its pretensions to laws of correct 
reasoning which is correct even though it leads to no 
matter of fact, or even to material falsity. It is 
regarded by the modern objective idealist as the ade- 
quate substitute for ancient ontological metaphysics ; 
but others treat it as that branch of rhetoric which 
teaches proficiency in argumentation. For a time a 
superficial compromise equilibrium was maintained 
wherein the logic of formal demonstration which the 
Middle Ages extracted from Aristotle was supple- 
mented by an inductive logic of discovery of truth that 
Mill extracted from the practice of scientific men. But 

132 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 133 

students of German philosophy, of mathematics, and of 
psychology, no matter how much they attacked one 
another, have made common cause in attack upon the 
orthodox logics both of deductive proof and inductive 
discovery. 

Logical theory presents a scene of chaos. There is 
little agreement as to its subject-matter, scope or pur- 
pose. This disagreement is not formal or nominal but 
affects the treatment of every topic. Take such a 
rudimentary matter as the nature of judgment. Repu- 
table authority can be quoted in behalf of every possible 
permutation of doctrine. Judgment is the central thing 
in logic ; and judgment is not logical at all, but personal 
and psychological. If logical, it is the primary func- 
tion to which both conception and inference are subordi- 
nate; and it is an after-product from them. The dis- 
tinction of subject and predicate is necessary, and it is 
totally irrelevant; or again, 'though it is found in some 
cases, it is not of great importance. Among those who 
hold that the subject-predicate relationship is essen- 
tial, some hold that judgment is an analysis of some- 
thing prior into them, and others assert that it is a 
synthesis of them into something else. Some hold that 
reality is always the subject of judgment, and others 
that " reality " is logically irrelevant. Among those 
who deny that judgment is the attribution of predi- 
cate to subject, who regard it as a relation of elements, 



134, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

some hold that the relation is " internal," some that 
it is " external," and others that it is sometimes one 
and sometimes the other. 

Unless logic is a matter of some practical account, 
these contrarieties are so numerous, so extensive, and 
so irreconcilable that they are ludicrous. If logic is 
an affair of practical moment, then these inconsistencies 
are serious. They testify to some deep-lying cause of 
intellectual disagreement and incoherency. In fact, 
contemporary logical theory is the ground upon which 
all philosophical differences and disputes are gath- 
ered together and focussed. How does the modification 
in the traditional conception of the relation of experi- 
ence and reason, the real and ideal affect logic? 

It affects, in the first place, the nature of logic itself. 
If thought or intelligence is the means of intentional 
reconstruction of experience, then logic, as an account 
of the procedure of thought, is not purely formal. It 
is not confined to laws of formally correct reasoning 
apart from truth of subject-matter. Neither, on the 
contrary, is it concerned with the inherent thought 
structures of the universe, as Hegel's logic would have 
it ; nor with the successive approaches of human thought 
to this objective thought structure as the logic of Lotze, 
Bosanquet, and other epistemological logicians would 
have it. If thinking is the way in which deliberate re- 
organization of experience is secured, then logic is such 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 135 

a clarified and systematized formulation of the pro- 
cedures of thinking as will enable the desired reconstruc- 
tion to go on more economically and efficiently. In 
language familiar to students, logic is both a science 
and an art ; a science so far as it gives an organized 
and tested descriptive account of the way in which 
thought actually goes on ; an art, so far as on the basis 
of this description it projects methods by which future 
thinking shall take advantage of the operations that 
lead to success and avoid those which result in failure. 

Thus is answered the dispute whether logic is em- 
pirical or normative, psychological or regulative. It is 
both. Logic is based on a definite and executive supply 
of empirical material. Men have been thinking for ages. 
They have observed, inferred, and reasoned in all sorts 
of ways and to all kinds of results. Anthropology, the 
study of the origin of myth, legend and cult ; linguistics 
and grammar ; rhetoric and former logical compositions 
all tell us how men have thought and what have been the 
purposes and consequences of different kinds of think- 
ing. Psychology, experimental and pathological, makes 
important contributions to our knowledge of how think- 
ing goes on and to what effect. Especially does the 
record of the growth of the various sciences afford in- 
struction in those concrete ways of inquiry and testing 
which have led men astray and which have proved ef- 
ficacious. Each science from mathematics to history 



136 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

exhibits typical fallacious methods and typical effica- 
cious methods in special subject-matters. Logical 
theory has thus a large, almost inexhaustible field of 
empirical study. 

The conventional statement that experience only tells 
us how men have thought or do think, while logic is 
concerned with norms, with how men should think, is 
ludicrously inept. Some sorts of thinking are shown by 
experience to have got nowhere, or worse than nowhere 
— into systematized delusion and mistake. Others have 
proved in manifest experience that they lead to fruitful 
and enduring discoveries. It is precisely in experience 
that the different consequences of different methods 
of investigation and ratiocination are convincingly 
shown. The parrot-like repetition of the distinction be- 
tween an empirical description of what is and a norma- 
tive account of what should be merely neglects the most 
striking fact about thinking as it empirically is — 
namely, its flagrant exhibition of cases of failure and 
success — that is, of good thinking and bad thinking. 
Any one who considers this empirical manifestation will 
not complain of lack of material from which to con- 
struct a regulative art. The more study that is given 
to empirical records of actual thought, the more ap- 
parent becomes the connection between the specific 
features of thinking which have produced failure and 
success. Out of this relationship of cause and effect 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 137 

as it is empirically ascertained grow the norms and 
regulations of an art of thinking. 

Mathematics is often cited as an example of purely 
normative thinking dependent upon a priori canons and 
supra-empirical material. But it is hard to see how the 
student who approaches the matter historically can 
avoid the conclusion that the status of mathematics is 
as empirical as that of metallurgy. Men began with 
counting and measuring things just as they began with 
pounding and burning them. One thing, as common 
speech profoundly has it, led to another. Certain ways 
were successful — not merely in the immediately practical 
sense, but in the sense of being interesting, of arousing 
attention, of exciting attempts at improvement. The 
present-day mathematical logician may present the 
structure of mathematics as if it had sprung all at once 
from the brain of a Zeus whose anatomy is that of pure 
logic. But, nevertheless, this very structure is a product 
of long historic growth, in which all kinds of experi- 
ments have been tried, in which some men have struck 
out in this direction and some in that, and in which some 
exercises and operations have resulted in confusion and 
others in triumphant clarifications and fruitful growths ; 
a history in which matter and methods have been con- 
stantly selected and worked over on the basis of em- 
pirical success and failure. 

The structure of alleged normative a priori mathe- 



138 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

matics is in truth the crowned result of ages of toilsome 
experience. The metallurgist who should write on the 
most highly developed method of dealing with ores would 
not, in truth, proceed any differently. He too selects, re- 
fines, and organizes the methods which in the past have 
been found to yield the maximum of achievement. Logic 
is a matter of profound human importance precisely 
because it is empirically founded and experimentally 
applied. So considered, the problem of logical theory 
is none other than the problem of the possibility of the 
development and employment of intelligent method in 
inquiries concerned with deliberate reconstruction of 
experience. And it is only saying again in more spe- 
cific form what has been said in general form to add 
that while such a logic has been developed in re- 
spect to mathematics and physical science, intelli- 
gent method, logic, is still far to seek in moral and 
political affairs. 

Assuming, accordingly, this idea of logic without 
argument, let us proceed to discuss some of its chief 
features. First, light is thrown by the origin of think- 
ing upon a logic which shall be a method of intelligent 
guidance of experience. In line with what has already 
been said about experience being a matter primarily of 
behavior, a sensori-motor matter, is the fact that think- 
ing takes its departure from specific conflicts in experi- 
ence that occasion perplexity and trouble. Men do not, 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 139 

in their natural estate, think when they have no troubles 
to cope with, no difficulties to overcome. A life of ease, 
of success without effort, would be a thoughtless life, 
and so also would a life of ready omnipotence. Be- 
ings who think are beings whose life is so hemmed in 
and constricted that they cannot directly carry through 
a course of action to victorious consummation. Men 
also do not tend to think when their action, when they 
are amid difficulties, is dictated to them by authority. 
Soldiers have difficulties and restrictions in plenty, but 
qua soldiers (as Aristotle would say) they are not no- 
torious for being thinkers. Thinking is done for them, 
higher up. The same is too true of most workingmen 
under present economic conditions. Difficulties occasion 
thinking only when thinking is the imperative or urgent 
way out, only when it is the indicated road to a solu- 
tion. Wherever external authority reigns, thinking is 
suspected and obnoxious. 

Thinking, however, is not the only way in which a 
personal solution of difficulties is sought. As we have 
seen, dreams, reveries, emotional idealizations are roads 
which are taken to escape the strain of perplexity and 
conflict. According to modern psychology, many sys- 
tematized delusions and mental disorders, probably hys- 
teria itself, originate as devices for getting freedom 
from troublesome conflicting factors. Such considera- 
tions throw into relief some of the traits essential to 



140 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

thinking as a way of responding to difficulty. The 
short-cut " solutions " alluded to do not get rid of the 
conflict and problems; they only get rid of the feeling 
of it. They cover up consciousness of it. Because the 
conflict remains in fact and is evaded in thought, dis- 
orders arise. 

The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking 
then is facing the facts — inquiry, minute and extensive 
scrutinizing, observation. Nothing has done greater 
harm to the successful conduct of the enterprise of 
thinking (and to the logics which reflect and formulate 
the undertaking) than the habit of treating observation 
as something outside of and prior to thinking, and 
thinking as something which can go on in the head with- 
out including observation of new facts as part of itself. 
Every approximation to such " thinking " is really an 
approach to the method of escape and self-delusion just 
referred to. It substitutes an emotionally agreeable and 
rationally self-consistent train of meanings for inquiry 
into the features of the situation which cause the trouble. 
It leads to that type of Idealism which has well been 
termed intellectual somnambulism. It creates a class of 
" thinkers " who are remote from practice and hence 
from testing their thought by application — a socially 
superior and irresponsible class. This is the condition 
causing the tragic division of theory and practice, and 
leading to an unreasonable exaltation of theory on one 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 141 

side and an unreasonable contempt for it on the other. 
It confirms current practice in its hard brutalities and 
dead routines just because it has transferred thinking 
and theory to a separate and nobler region. Thus has 
the idealist conspired with the materialist to keep actual 
life impoverished and inequitable. 

The isolation of thinking from confrontation with 
facts encourages that kind of observation which merely 
accumulates brute facts, which occupies itself labori- 
ously with mere details, but never inquires into their 
meaning and consequences — a safe occupation, for 
it never contemplates any use to be made of the ob- 
served facts in determining a plan for changing the 
situation. Thinking which is a method of reconstruct- 
ing experience treats observation of facts, on the other 
hand, as the indispensable step of defining the problem, 
of locating the trouble, of forcing home a definite, in- 
stead of a merely vague emotional, sense of what the 
difficulty is and where it lies. It is not aimless, random, 
miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific and limited by 
the character of the trouble undergone. The purpose is 
so to clarify the disturbed and confused situation that 
reasonable ways of dealing with it may be suggested. 
When the scientific man appears to observe aimlessly, 
it is merely that he is so in love with problems as 
sources and guides of inquiry, that he is striving to turn 
up a problem where none appears on the surface: he 



142 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

is, as we say, hunting for trouble because of the satis- 
faction to be had in coping with it. 

Specific and wide observation of concrete fact always, 
then, corresponds not only with a sense of a problem or 
difficulty, but with some vague sense of the meaning of 
the difficulty, that is, of what it imports or signifies 
in subsequent experience. It is a kind of anticipation 
or prediction of what is coming. We speak, very truly, 
of impending trouble, and in observing the signs of what 
the trouble is, we are at the same time expecting, fore- 
casting — in short, framing an idea, becoming aware 
of meaning. When the trouble is not only impending 
but completely actual and present, we are overwhelmed. 
We do not think, but give way to depression. The kind 
of trouble that occasions thinking is that which is in- 
complete and developing, and where what is found 
already in existence can be employed as a sign from 
which to infer what is likely to come. When we intelli- 
gently observe, we are, as we say apprehensive, as well 
as apprehending. We are on the alert for something 
still to come. Curiosity, inquiry, investigation, are di- 
rected quite as truly into what is going to happen next 
as into what has happened. An intelligent interest in 
the latter is an interest in getting evidence, indications, 
symptoms for inferring the former. Observation is 
diagnosis and diagnosis implies an interest in anticipa* 
tion and preparation. It makes ready in advance an 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 143 

attitude of response so that we shall not be caught 
unawares. 

That which is not already in existence, that which is 
only anticipated and inferred, cannot be observed. It 
does not have the status of fact, of something given, a 
datum, but of a meaning, an idea. So far as ideas are 
not fancies, framed by emotionalized memory for escape 
and refuge, they are precisely anticipations of some- 
thing still to come aroused by looking into the facts of 
a developing situation. The blacksmith watches his 
iron, its color and texture, to get evidence of what it 
is getting ready to pass into ; the physician observes 
his patient to detect symptoms of change in some definite 
direction; the scientific man keeps his attention upon 
his laboratory material to get a clue as to what mill 
happen under certain conditions. The very fact that 
observation is not an end in itself but a search for evi- 
dence and signs shows that along with observation goes 
inference, anticipatory forecast — in short an idea, 
thought or conception. 

In a more technical context, it would be worth while 
to see what light this logical correspondence of observed 
fact and projected idea or meaning throws upon certain 
traditional philosophical problems and puzzles, includ- 
ing that of subject and predicate in judgment, object 
and subject in knowledge, " real " and " ideal " gen- 
erally. But at this time, we must confine ourselves to 



144 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

pointing out that this view of the correlative origin 
and function of observed fact and projected idea in 
experience, commits us to some very important conse- 
quences concerning the nature of ideas, meanings, con- 
ceptions, or whatever word may be employed to denote 
the specifically mental function. Because they are sug- 
gestions of something that may happen or eventuate, 
they are (as we saw in the case of ideals generally) plat- 
forms of response to what is going on. The man who 
detects that the cause of his difficulty is an automobile 
bearing down upon him is not guaranteed safety; he 
may have made his observation-forecast too late. But 
if his anticipation-perception comes in season, he has 
the basis for doing something which will avert threaten- 
ing disaster. Because he foresees an impending result, 
he may do something that will lead to the situation 
eventuating in some other way. All intelligent thinking 
means an increment of freedom in action — an emancipa- 
tion from chance and fatality. " Thought " represents 
the suggestion of a way of response that is different 
from that which would have been followed if intelligent 
observation had not effected an inference as to the 
future. 

Now a method of action, a mode of response, intended 
to produce a certain result — that is, to enable the black- 
smith to give a certain form to his hot iron, the physi- 
cian to treat the patient so as to facilitate recovery, the 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION ■ 145 

scientific experimenter to draw a conclusion which will 
apply to other cases, — is by the nature of the case ten- 
tative, uncertain till tested by its results. The signifi- 
cance of this fact for the theory of truth will be dis- 
cussed below. Here it is enough to note that notions, 
theories, systems, no matter how elaborate and self-con- 
sistent they are, must be regarded as hypotheses. They 
are to be accepted as bases of actions which test them, 
not as finalities. To perceive this fact is to abolish 
rigid dogmas from the world. It is to recognize that 
conceptions, theories and systems of thought are always 
open to development through use. It is to enforce the 
lesson that we must be on the lookout quite as much 
for indications to alter them as for opportunities to 
assert them. They are tools. As in the case of all 
tools, their value resides not in themselves but in their 
capacity to work shown in the consequences of their 
use. 

Nevertheless, inquiry is free only when the interest in 
knowing is so developed that thinking carries with it 
something worth while for itself, something having its 
own esthetic and moral interest. Just because knowing 
is not self-enclosed and final but is instrumental to 
reconstruction of situations, there is always danger that 
it will be subordinated to maintaining some precon- 
ceived purpose or prejudice. Then reflection ceases to 
be complete; it falls short. Being precommitted to 



146 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

arriving at some special result, it is not sincere. It is 
one thing to say that all knowing has an end beyond 
itself, and another thing, a thing of a contrary kind, to 
say that an act of knowing has a particular end which 
it is bound, in advance, to reach. Much less is it true 
that the instrumental nature of thinking means that it 
exists for the sake of attaining some private, one-sided 
advantage upon which one has set one's heart. Any 
limitation whatever of the end means limitation in the 
thinking process itself. It signifies that it does not 
attain its full growth and movement, but is cramped, 
impeded, interfered with. The only situation in which 
knowing is fully stimulated is one in which the end is 
developed in the process of inquiry and testing. 

Disinterested and impartial inquiry is then far from 
meaning that knowing is self-enclosed and irresponsible. 
It means that there is no particular end set up in 
advance so as to shut in the activities of observation, 
forming of ideas, and application. Inquiry is emanci- 
pated. It is encouraged to attend to every fact that 
is relevant to defining the problem or need, and to follow 
up every suggestion that promises a clue. The barriers 
to free inquiry are so many and so solid that mankind 
is to be congratulated that the very act of investigation 
is capable of itself becoming a delightful and absorbing 
pursuit, capable of enlisting on its side man's sporting 
instincts. 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 147 

Just in the degree in which thought ceases to be held 
down to ends fixed by social custom, a social division 
of labor grows up. Investigation has become a domi- 
nant life occupation for some persons. Only super- 
ficially, however, does this confirm the idea that theory 
and knowledge are ends in themselves. They are, rela- 
tively speaking, ends in themselves for some persons. 
But these persons represent a social division of labor; 
and their specialization can be trusted only when such 
persons are in unobstructed co-operation with other 
social occupations, sensitive to others' problems and 
transmitting results to them for wider application in 
action. When this social relationship of persons par- 
ticularly engaged in carrying on the enterprise of know- 
ing is forgotten and the class becomes isolated, inquiry 
loses stimulus and purpose. It degenerates into sterile 
specialization, a kind of intellectual busy work carried 
on by socially absent-minded men. Details are heaped 
up in the name of science, and abstruse dialectical de- 
velopments of systems occur. Then the occupation is 
" rationalized " under the lofty name of devotion to 
truth for its own sake. But when the path of true 
science is retaken these things are brushed aside and 
forgotten. They turn out to have been the toy- 
ings of vain and irresponsible men. The only guar- 
antee of impartial, disinterested inquiry is the 
social sensitiveness of the inquirer to the needs 



148 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and problems of those with whom he is asso- 
ciated. 

As the instrumental theory is favorable to high 
esteem for impartial and disinterested inquiry, so, con- 
trary to the impressions of some critics, it sets much 
store upon the apparatus of deduction. It is a strange 
notion that because one says that the cognitive value of 
conceptions, definitions, generalizations, classifications 
and the development of consecutive implications is not 
self-resident, that therefore one makes light of the de- 
ductive function, or denies its fruitfulness and neces- 
sity. The instrumental theory only attempts to state 
with some scrupulousness where the value is found 
and to prevent its being sought in the wrong place. 
It says that knowing begins with specific observations 
that define the problem and ends with specific observa- 
tions that test a hypothesis for its solution. But that 
the idea, the meaning, which the original observations 
suggest and the final ones test, itself requires careful 
scrutiny and prolonged development, the theory would 
be the last to deny. To say that a locomotive is an 
agency, that it is intermediate between a need in experi- 
ence and its satisfaction, is not to depreciate the worth 
of careful and elaborate construction of the locomotive, 
or the need of subsidiary tools and processes that are 
devoted to introducing improvements into its structure. 
One would rather say that because the locomotive is 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 149 

intermediary in experience, not primary and not final, 
it is impossible to devote too much care to its con- 
structive development. " 

Such a deductive science as mathematics represents 
the perfecting of method. That a method to those con- 
cerned with it should present itself as an end on its 
own account is no more surprising than that there 
should be a distinct business for making any tool. 
Rarely are those who invent and perfect a tool those 
who employ it. There is, indeed, one marked difference 
between the physical and the intellectual instrumental- 
ity. The development of the latter runs far beyond 
any immediately visible use. The artistic interest in 
perfecting the method by itself is strong — as the uten- 
sils of civilization may themselves become works of finest 
art. But from the practical standpoint this difference 
shows that the advantage as an instrumentality is on 
the side of the intellectual tool. Just because it is not 
formed with a special application in mind, because it is 
a highly generalized tool, it is the more flexible in 
adaptation to unforeseen uses. It can be employed in 
dealing with problems that were not anticipated. The 
mind is prepared in advance for all sorts of intellectual 
emergencies, and when the new problem occurs it does 
not have to wait till it can get a special instrument 
ready. 

More definitely, abstraction is indispensable if one 



150 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

experience is to be applicable in other experiences. 
Every concrete experience in its totality is unique; it is 
itself, non-reduplicable. Taken in its full concreteness, 
it yields no instruction, it throws no light. What is 
called abstraction means that some phase of it is 
selected for the sake of the aid it gives in grasping 
something else. Taken by itself, it is a mangled frag- 
ment, a poor substitute for the living whole from which 
it is extracted. But viewed teleologically or practically, 
it represents the only way in which one experience can 
be made of any value for another — the only way in 
which something enlightening can be secured. What is 
called false or vicious abstractionism signifies that the 
function of the detached fragment is forgotten and neg- 
lected, so that it is esteemed barely in itself as some- 
thing of a higher order than the muddy and irregular 
concrete from which it was wrenched. Looked at func- 
tionally, not structurally and statically, abstraction 
means that something has been released from one experi- 
ence for transfer to another. Abstraction is liberation. 
The more theoretical, the more abstract, an abstraction, 
or the farther away it is from anything experienced in 
its concreteness, the better fitted it is to deal with 
any one of the indefinite variety of things that may 
later present themselves. Ancient mathematics and 
physics were much nearer the gross concrete experi- 
ence than are modern. For that very reason they were 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 151 

more impotent in affording any insight into and con- 
trol over such concretes as present themselves in new 
and unexpected forms. 

Abstraction and generalization have always been 
recognized as close kin. It may be said that they are 
the negative and positive sides of the same function. 
Abstraction sets free some factor so that it may be 
used. Generalization is the use. It carries over and 
extends. It is always in some sense a leap in the dark. 
It is an adventure. There can be no assurance in 
advance that what is extracted from one concrete can 
be fruitfully extended to another individual case. Since 
these other cases are individual and concrete they must 
be dissimilar. The trait of flying is detached from 
the concrete bird. This abstraction is then carried over 
to the bat, and it is expected in view of the application 
of the quality to have some of the other traits of the 
bird. This trivial instance indicates the essence of 
generalization, and also illustrates the riskiness of the 
proceeding. It transfers, extends, applies, a result of 
some former experience to the reception and interpreta- 
tion of a new one. Deductive processes define, delimit, 
purify and set in order the conceptions through which 
this enriching and directive operation is carried on, 
but they cannot, however perfect, guarantee the out- 
come. 

The pragmatic value of organization is so conspicu- 



152 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ously enforced in contemporary life that it hardly seems 
necessaiy to dwell upon the instrumental significance of 
classification and systematization. When the existence 
of qualitative and fixed species was denied to be the 
supreme object of knowledge, classification was often 
regarded, especially by the empirical school, as merely a 
linguistic device. It was convenient for memory and 
communication to have words that sum up a number of 
particulars. Classes were . supposed to exist only in 
speech. Later, ideas were recognized as a kind of ter- 
tlum quid between things and words. Classes were al- 
lowed to exist in the mind as purely mental things. 
The critical disposition of empiricism is well exemplified 
here. To assign any objectivity to classes was to en- 
courage a belief in eternal species and occult essences 
and to strengthen the arms of a decadent and obnox- 
ious science — a point of view well illustrated in Locke. 
General ideas are useful in economizing effort, enabling 
us to condense particular experiences into simpler and 
more easily carried bunches and making it easier to 
identify new observations. 

So far nominalism and conceptualism — the theory 
that kinds exist only in words or in ideas — was 
on the right track. It emphasized the teleological 
character of systems and classifications, that they exist 
for the sake of economy and efficiency in reaching ends. 
But this truth was perverted into a false notion, because 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 153 

the active and doing side of experience was denied or 
ignored. Concrete things have ways of acting, as many 
ways of acting as they have points of interaction with 
other things. One thing is callous, unresponsive, inert 
in the presence of some other things ; it is alert, eager, 
and on the aggressive with respect to other things; in 
a third case, it is receptive, docile. Now different ways 
of behaving, in spite of their endless diversity, may be 
classed together in view of common relationship to an 
end. No sensible person tries to do everything. He 
has certain main interests and leading aims by which 
he makes his behavior coherent and effective. To have 
an aim is to limit, select, concentrate, group. Thus a 
basis is furnished for selecting and organizing things 
according as their ways of acting are related to car- 
rying forward pursuit. Cherry trees will be differ- 
ently grouped by woodworkers, orchardists, artists, 
scientists and merry-makers. To the execution of 
different purposes different ways of acting and re- 
acting on the part of trees are important. Each 
classification may be equally sound when the difference 
of ends is borne in mind. 

Nevertheless there is a genuine objective standard for 
the goodness of special classifications. One will further 
the cabinetmaker in reaching his end while another will 
hamper him. One classification will assist the botanist 
in carrying on fruitfully his work of inquiry, and an- 



154 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

other will retard and confuse him. The teleological 
theory of classification does not therefore commit us 
to the notion that classes are purely verbal or purely 
mental. Organization is no more merely nominal or 
mental in any art, including the art of inquiry, than 
it is in a department store or railway system. The 
necessity of execution supplies objective criteria. 
Things have to be sorted out and arranged so that 
their grouping will promote successful action for 
ends. Convenience, economy and efficiency are the 
bases of classification, but these things are not re- 
stricted to verbal communication with others nor to 
inner consciousness; they concern objective action. 
They must take effect in the world. 

At the same time, a classification is not a bare 
transcript or duplicate of some finished and done-for 
arrangement pre-existing in nature. It is rather a 
repertory of weapons for attack upon the future and 
the unknown. For success, the details of past knowl- 
edge must be reduced from bare facts to meanings, the 
fewer, simpler and more extensive the better. They 
must be broad enough in scope to prepare inquiry to 
cope with any phenomenon however unexpected. They 
must be arranged so as not to overlap, for otherwise 
when they are applied to new events they interfere 
and produce confusion. In order that there may be 
ease and economy of movement in dealing with the 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 155 

enormous diversity of occurrences that present them- 
selves, we must be able to move promptly and definitely 
from one tool of attack to another. In other words, 
our various classes and kinds must be themselves classi- 
fied in graded series from the larger to the more spe- 
cific. There must not only be streets, but the streets 
must be laid out with reference to facilitating passage 
from any one to any other. Classification transforms 
a wilderness of by-ways in experience into a well- 
ordered system of roads, promoting transportation 
and communication in inquiry. As soon as men begin 
to take foresight for the future and to prepare them- 
selves in advance to meet it effectively and prosper- 
ously, the deductive operations and their results gain 
in importance. In every practical enterprise there are 
goods to be produced, and whatever eliminates wasted 
material and promotes economy and efficiency of pro- 
duction is precious. 

Little time is left to speak of the account of the 
nature of truth given by the experimental and func- 
tional type of logic. This is less to be regretted be- 
cause this account is completely a corollary from the 
nature of thinking and ideas. If the view held as to 
the latter is understood, the conception of truth fol- 
lows as a matter of course. If it be not understood, 
any attempt to present the theory of truth is bound 
to be confusing, and the theory itself to seem arbi- 



156 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

trary and absurd. If ideas, meanings, conceptions, 
notions, theories, systems are instrumental to an active 
reorganization of the given environment, to a removal 
of some specific trouble and perplexity, then the test of 
their validity and value lies in accomplishing this work. 
If they succeed in their office, they are reliable, sound, 
valid, good, true. If they fail to clear up confusion, 
to eliminate defects, if they increase confusion, uncer- 
tainty and evil when they are acted upon, then are they 
false. Confirmation, corroboration, verification lie in 
works, consequences. Handsome is that handsome does. 
By their fruits shall ye know them. That which guides 
us truly is true — demonstrated capacity for such guid- 
ance is precisely what is meant by truth. The adverb 
" truly " is more fundamental than either the adjec- 
tive, true, or the noun, truth. An adverb expresses a 
way, a mode of acting. Now an idea or conception is 
a claim or injunction or plan to act in a certain way 
as the way to arrive at the clearing up of a specific 
situation. When the claim or pretension or plan is 
acted upon it guides us truly or falsely; it leads us to 
our end or away from it. Its active, dynamic function 
is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality 
of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity. 
The hypothesis that works is the true one; and 
truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection 
of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 157 

receive confirmation in their works and conse- 
quences. 

So wholly does the worth of this conception of truth 
depend upon the correctness of the prior account of 
thinking that it is more profitable to consider why 
the conception gives offence than to expound it on its 
own account. Part of the reason why it has been 
found so obnoxious is doubtless its novelty and defects 
in its statement. Too often, for example, when truth 
has been thought of as satisfaction, it has been thought 
of as merely emotional satisfaction, a private comfort, 
a meeting of purely personal need. But the satisfac- 
tion in question means a satisfaction of the needs and 
conditions of the problem out of which the idea, the 
purpose and method of action, arises. It includes 
public and objective conditions. It is not to be manip- 
ulated by whim or personal idiosyncrasy. Again 
when truth is defined as utility, it is often thought 
to mean utility for some purely personal end, some 
profit upon which a particular individual has set his 
heart. So repulsive is a conception of truth which 
makes it a mere tool of private ambition and ag- 
grandizement, that the wonder is that critics have 
attributed such a notion to sane men. As matter of 
fact, truth as utility means service in making just that 
contribution to reorganization in experience that the 
idea or theory claims to be able to make. The usefulness 



158 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

of a road is not measured by the degree in which it 
lends itself to the purposes of a highwayman. It is 
measured by whether it actually functions as a road, as 
a means of easy and effective public transportation and 
communication. And so with the serviceableness of an 
idea or hypothesis as a measure of its truth. 

Turning from such rather superficial misunderstand- 
ings, we find, I think, the chief obstacle to the recep- 
tion of this notion of truth in an inheritance from the 
classic tradition that has become so deeply engrained in 
men's minds. In just the degree in which existence is 
divided into two realms, a higher one of perfect being 
and a lower one of seeming, phenomenal, deficient 
reality, truth and falsity are thought of as fixed, ready- 
made static properties of things themselves. Supreme 
Reality is true Being, inferior and imperfect Reality is 
false Being. It makes claims to Reality which it can- 
not substantiate. It is deceitful, fraudulent, inherently 
unworthy of trust and belief. Beliefs are false not be- 
cause they mislead us ; they are not mistaken ways of 
thinking. They are false because they admit and ad- 
here to false existences or subsistences. Other notions 
are true because they do have to do with true Being — 
with full and ultimate Reality. Such a notion lies at 
the back of the head of every one who has, in however 
an indirect way, been a recipient of the ancient and 
medieval tradition. This view is radically challenged by 



LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 159 

the pragmatic conception of truth, and the impossibility 
of reconciliation or compromise is, I think, the cause of 
the shock occasioned by the newer theory. 

This contrast, however, constitutes the importance of 
the new theory as well as the unconscious obstruction 
to its acceptance. The older conception worked out 
practically to identify truth with authoritative dogma. 
A society that chiefly esteems order, that finds growth 
painful and change disturbing, inevitably seeks for a 
fixed body of superior truths upon which it may depend. 
It looks backward, to something already in existence, 
for the source and sanction of truth. It falls back 
upon what is antecedent, prior, original, a priori, for 
assurance. The thought of looking ahead, toward the 
eventual, toward consequences, creates uneasiness and 
fear. It disturbs the sense of rest that is attached to 
the ideas of fixed Truth already in existence. It puts 
a heavy burden of responsibility upon us for search, 
unremitting observation, scrupulous development of 
hypotheses and thoroughgoing testing. In physical 
matters men have slowly grown accustomed in all spe- 
cific beliefs to identifying the true with the verified. 
But they still hesitate to recognize the implication of 
this identification and to derive the definition of truth 
from it. For while it is nominally agreed upon as a 
commonplace that definitions ought to spring from con- 
crete and specific cases rather than be invented in the 



160 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

empty air and imposed upon particulars, there is a 
strange unwillingness to act upon the maxim in defining 
truth. To generalize the recognition that the true 
means the verified and means nothing else places upon 
men the responsibility for surrendering political and 
moral dogmas, and subjecting to the test of conse- 
quences their most cherished prejudices. Such a change 
involves a great change in the seat of authority and the 
methods of decision in society. Some of them, as first 
fruits of the newer logic, will be considered in the fol- 
lowing lectures. 



CHAPTER VII 

RECONSTRUCTION IN MORAL CONCEPTIONS 

The impact of the alteration in methods of scientific 
thinking upon moral ideas is, in general, obvious. 
Goods, ends are multiplied. Rules are softened into 
principles, and principles are modified into methods of 
understanding. Ethical theory began among the 
Greeks as an attempt to find a regulation for the con- 
duct of life which should have a rational basis and 
purpose instead of being derived from custom. But 
reason as a substitute for custom was under the obliga- 
tion of supplying objects and laws as fixed as those of 
custom had been. Ethical theory ever since has been 
singularly hypnotized by the notion that its business 
is to discover some final end or good or some ultimate 
and supreme law. This is the common element among 
the diversity of theories. Some have held that the end 
is loyalty or obedience to a higher power or authority ; 
and they have variously found this higher principle in 
Divine Will, the will of the secular ruler, the main- 
tenance of institutions in which the purpose of superiors 
is embodied, and the rational consciousness of duty. But 
they have differed from one another because there was 

161 



162 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

one point in which they were agreed: a single and final 
source of law. Others have asserted that it is impossible 
to locate morality in conformity to law-giving power, 
and that it must be sought in ends that are goods. And 
some have sought the good in self-realization, some in 
holiness, some in happiness, some in the greatest pos- 
sible aggregate of pleasures. And yet these schools 
have agreed in the assumption that there is a single, 
fixed and final good. They have been able to dis- 
pute with one another only because of their common 
premise. 

The question arises whether the way out of the con- 
fusion and conflict is not to go to the root of the 
matter by questioning this common element. Is not the 
belief in the single, final and ultimate (whether con- 
ceived as good or as authoritative law) an intellectual 
product of that feudal organization which is disappear- 
ing historically and of that belief in a bounded, ordered 
cosmos, wherein rest is higher than motion, which has 
disappeared from natural science? It has been re- 
peatedly suggested that the present limit of intellectual 
reconstruction lies in the fact that it has not as yet 
been seriously applied in the moral and social disci- 
plines. Would not this further application demand 
precisely that we advance to a belief in a plurality of 
changing, moving, individualized goods and ends, and 
to a belief that principles, criteria, laws are intellectual 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 163 

instruments for analyzing individual or unique situa- 
tions ? 

The blunt assertion that every moral situation is a 
unique situation having its own irreplaceable good may 
seem not merely blunt but preposterous. For the 
established tradition teaches that it is precisely the 
irregularity of special cases which makes necessary the 
guidance of conduct by universals, and that the es- 
sence of the virtuous disposition is willingness to sub- 
ordinate every particular case to adjudication by a 
fixed principle. It would then follow that submission 
of a generic end and law to determination by the 
concrete situation entails complete confusion and un- 
restrained licentiousness. Let us, however, follow the 
pragmatic rule, and in order to discover the meaning 
of the idea ask for its consequences. Then it surpris- 
ingly turns out that the primary significance of the 
unique and morally ultimate character of the concrete 
situation is to transfer the weight and burden of 
morality to intelligence. It does not destroy responsi- 
bility; it only locates it. A moral situation is one in 
which judgment and choice are required antecedently 
to overt action. The practical meaning of the situation 
— that is to say the action needed to satisfy it — is not 
self-evident. It has to be searched for. There are con- 
flicting desires and alternative apparent goods. What 
is needed is to find the right course of action, the right 



164 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

good. Hence, inquiry is exacted: observation of the 
detailed makeup of the situation; analysis into its 
diverse factors; clarification of what is obscure; dis- 
counting of the more insistent and vivid traits ; tracing 
the consequences of the various modes of action that 
suggest themselves; regarding the decision reached as 
hypothetical and tentative until the anticipated or sup- 
posed consequences which led to its adoption have been 
squared with actual consequences. This inquiry is in- 
telligence. Our moral failures go back to some weak- 
ness of disposition, some absence of sympathy, some one- 
sided bias that makes us perform the judgment of the 
concrete case carelessly or perversely. Wide sympathy, 
keen sensitiveness, persistence in the face of the dis- 
agreeable, balance of interests enabling us to undertake 
the work of analysis and decision intelligently are the 
distinctively moral traits — the virtues or moral excel- 
lencies. 

It is worth noting once more that the underlying 
issue is, after all, only the same as that which has been 
already threshed out in physical inquiry. There too it 
long seemed as if rational assurance and demonstration 
could be attained only if we began with universal con- 
ceptions and subsumed particular cases under them. 
The men who initiated the methods of inquiry that are 
now everywhere adopted were denounced in their day 
(and sincerely) as subverters of truth and foes of 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 165 

science. If they have won in the end, it is because, as 
has already been pointed out, the method of universals 
confirmed prejudices and sanctioned ideas that had 
gained currency irrespective of evidence for them ; while 
placing the initial and final weight upon the individual 
case, stimulated painstaking inquiry into facts and ex- 
amination of principles. In the end, loss of eternal 
truths was more than compensated for in the accession 
of quotidian facts. The loss of the system of superior 
and fixed definitions and kinds was more than made 
up for by the growing system of hypotheses and laws 
used in classifying facts. After all, then, we are only 
pleading for the adoption in moral reflection of the 
logic that has been proved to make for security, strin- 
gency and fertility in passing judgments upon physical 
phenomena. And the reason is the same. The old 
method in spite of its nominal and esthetic worship 
of reason discouraged reason, because it hindered 
the operation of scrupulous and unremitting in- 
quiry. 

More definitely, the transfer of the burden of the 
moral life from following rules or pursuing fixed ends 
over to the detection of the ills that need remedy in a 
special case and the formation of plans and methods for 
dealing with them, eliminates the causes which have 
kept moral theory controversial, and which have also 
kept it remote from helpful contact with the exigencies 



166 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

of practice. The theory of fixed ends inevitably leads 
thought into the bog of disputes that cannot be settled. 
If there is one summum bonurri, one supreme end, what 
is it? To consider this problem is to place ourselves in 
the midst of controversies that are as acute now as they 
were two thousand years ago. Suppose we take a seem- 
ingly more empirical view, and say that while there is 
not a single end, there also are not as many as there are 
specific situations that require amelioration; but there 
are a number of such natural goods as health, wealth, 
honor or good name, friendship, esthetic appreciation, 
learning and such moral goods as justice, temperance, 
benevolence, etc. What or who is to decide the right 
of way when these ends conflict with one another, as they 
are sure to do? Shall we resort to the method that 
once brought such disrepute upon the whole business 
of ethics: Casuistry? Or shall we have recourse to 
what Bentham well called the ipse dixit method: the 
arbitrary preference of this or that person for this or 
that end? Or shall we be forced to arrange them all in 
an order of degrees from the highest good down to the 
least precious? Again we find ourselves in the middle 
of unreconciled disputes with no indication of the way 
out. 

Meantime, the special moral perplexities where the 
aid of intelligence is required go unenlightened. We 
cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 167 

or kindness in general. Action is always specific, con- 
crete, individualized, unique. And consequently judg- 
ments as to acts to be performed must be similarly 
specific. To say that a man seeks health or justice 
is only to say that he seeks to live healthily or justly. 
These things, like truth, are adverbial. They are modi- 
fiers of action in special cases. How to live healthily 
or justly is a matter which differs with every person. 
It varies with his past experience, his opportunities, his 
temperamental and acquired weaknesses and abilities. 
Not man in general but a particular man suffering from 
some particular disability aims to live healthily, and 
consequently health cannot mean for him exactly what it 
means for any other mortal. Healthy living is not some- 
thing to be attained by itself apart from other ways of 
living. A man needs to be healthy in his life, not apart 
from it, and what does life mean except the aggregate 
of his pursuits and activities? A man who aims at 
health as a distinct end becomes a valetudinarian, or a 
fanatic, or a mechanical performer of exercises, or an 
athlete so one-sided that his pursuit of bodily develop- 
ment injures his heart. When the endeavor to 
realize a so-called end does not temper and color all 
other activities, life is portioned out into strips and 
fractions. Certain acts and times are devoted to getting 
health, others to cultivating religion, others to seeking 
learning, to being a good citizen, a devotee of fine art 



168 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

and so on. This is the only logical alternative to sub- 
ordinating all aims to the accomplishment of one alone — 
fanaticism. This is out of fashion at present, but who 
can say how much of distraction and dissipation in life, 
and how much of its hard and narrow rigidity is the 
outcome of men's failure to realize that each situation 
has its own unique end and that the whole personality 
should be concerned with it? Surely, once more, what a 
man needs is to live healthily, and this result so affects 
all the activities of his life that it cannot be set up as 
a separate and independent good. 

Nevertheless the general notions of health, disease, 
justice, artistic culture are of great importance: Not, 
however, because this or that case may be brought ex- 
haustively under a single head and its specific traits 
shut out, but because generalized science provides a 
man as physician and artist and citizen, with questions 
to ask, investigations to make, and enables him to 
understand the meaning of what he sees. Just in the 
degree in which a physician is an artist in his work he 
uses his science, no matter how extensive and accurate, 
to furnish him with tools of inquiry into the individual 
case, and with methods of forecasting a method of 
dealing with it. Just in the degree in which, no matter 
how great his learning, he subordinates the individual 
case to some classification of diseases and some generic 
rule of treatment, he sinks to the level of the routine 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 169 

mechanic. His intelligence and his action become rigid, 
dogmatic, instead of free and flexible. 

Moral goods and ends exist only when something has 
to be done. The fact that something has to be done 
proves that there are deficiencies, evils in the existent 
situation. This ill is just the specific ill that it is. It 
never is an exact duplicate of anything else. Conse- 
quently the good of the situation has to be discovered, 
projected and attained on the basis of the exact defect 
and trouble to be rectified. It cannot intelligently be 
injected into the situation from without. Yet it is the 
part of wisdom to compare different cases, to gather 
together the ills from which humanity suffers, and to 
generalize the corresponding goods into classes. Health, 
wealth, industry, temperance, amiability, courtesy, 
learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience, 
enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other gen- 
eralized ends are acknowledged as goods. But the value 
of this systematization is intellectual or analytic. 
Classifications suggest possible traits to be on the look- 
out for in studying a particular case ; they suggest 
methods of action to be tried in removing the inferred 
causes of ill. They are tools of insight ; their value is 
in promoting an individualized response in the indi- 
vidual situation. 

Morals is not a catalogue of acts nor a set of rules 
to be applied like drugstore prescriptions or cook-book 



170 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

recipes. The need in morals is for specific methods 
of inquiry and of contrivance: Methods of inquiry to 
locate difficulties and evils ; methods of contrivance to 
form plans to be used as working hypotheses in dealing 
with them. And the pragmatic import of the logic 
of individualized situations, each having its own irre- 
placeable good and principle, is to transfer the atten- 
tion of theory from preoccupation with general con- 
ceptions to the problem of developing effective methods 
of inquiry. 

Two ethical consequences of great moment should be 
remarked. The belief in fixed values has bred a division 
of ends into intrinsic and instrumental, of those that 
are really worth while in themselves and those that are 
of importance only as means to intrinsic goods. Indeed, 
it is often thought to be the very beginning of wisdom, 
of moral discrimination, to make this distinction. Dia- 
lectically, the distinction is interesting and seems harm- 
less. But carried into practice it has an import that 
is tragic. Historically, it has been the source and 
justification of a hard and fast difference between ideal 
goods on one side and material goods on the other. 
At present those who would be liberal conceive intrinsic 
goods as esthetic in nature rather than as exclusively 
religious or as intellectually contemplative. But the 
effect is the same. So-called intrinsic goods, whether 
religious or esthetic, are divorced from those interests 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 171 

of daily life which because of their constancy and 
urgency form the preoccupation of the great mass. 
Aristotle used this distinction to declare that slaves and 
the working class though they are necessary for the 
state — the commonweal — are not constituents of it. 
That which is regarded as merely instrumental must 
approach drudgery; it cannot command either intellec- 
tual, artistic or moral attention and respect. Anything 
becomes unworthy whenever it is thought of as intrin- 
sically lacking worth. So men of " ideal " interests have 
chosen for the most part the way of neglect and escape. 
The urgency and pressure of " lower " ends have been 
covered up by polite conventions. Or, they have been 
relegated to a baser class of mortals in order that the 
few might be free to attend to the goods that are really 
or intrinsically worth while. This withdrawal, in the 
name of higher ends, has left, for mankind at large and 
especially for energetic " practical " people the lower 
activities in complete command. 

No one can possibly estimate how much of the ob- 
noxious materialism and brutality of our economic life 
is due to the fact that economic ends have been re- 
garded as merely instrumental. When they are recog- 
nized to be as intrinsic and final in their place as any 
others, then it will be seen that they are capable of 
idealization, and that if life is to be worth while, they 
must acquire ideal and intrinsic value, Esthetic, re- 



172 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ligious and other " ideal " ends are now thin and meagre 
or else idle and luxurious because of the separation from 
" instrumental " or economic ends. Only in connection 
with the latter can they be woven into the texture of 
daily life and made substantial and pervasive. The van- 
ity and irresponsibility of values that are merely final 
and not also in turn means to the enrichment of other 
occupations of life ought to be obvious. But now the 
doctrine of " higher " ^nds gives aid, comfort and sup- 
port to every socially isolated and socially irrespon- 
sible scholar, specialist, esthete and religionist. It pro- 
tects the vanity and irresponsibility of his calling from 
observation by others and by himself. The moral de- 
ficiency of the calling is transformed into a cause of 
admiration and gratulation. 

The other generic change lies in doing away once for 
all with the traditional distinction between moral goods, 
like the virtues, and natural goods like health, economic 
security, art, science and the like. The point of view 
under discussion is not the only one which has deplored 
this rigid distinction and endeavored to abolish it. Some 
schools have even gone so far as to regard moral excel- 
lencies, qualities of character as of value only because 
they promote natural goods. But the experimental 
logic when carried into morals makes every quality 
that is judged to be good according as it contributes 
to amelioration of existing ills. And in so doing, it 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 173 

enforces the moral meaning of natural science. When 
all is said and done in criticism of present social de- 
ficiencies, one may well wonder whether the root diffi- 
culty does not lie in the separation of natural and 
moral science. When physics, chemistry, biology, medi- 
cine, contribute to the detection of concrete human 
woes and to the development of plans for remedying 
them and relieving the human estate, they become moral ; 
they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or 
science. The latter then loses its peculiar flavor of the 
didactic and pedantic ; its ultra-moralistic and horta- 
tory tone. It loses its thinness and shrillness as well as 
its vagueness. It gains agencies that are efficacious. 
But the gain is not confined to the side of moral science. 
Natural science loses its divorce from humanity; it 
becomes itself humanistic in quality. It is something to 
be pursued not in a technical and specialized way for 
what is called truth for its own sake, but with the 
sense of its social bearing, its intellectual indispensable- 
ness. It is technical only in the sense that it provides 
the technique of social and moral engineering. 

When the consciousness of science is fully impreg- 
nated with the consciousness of human value, the 
greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, 
the split between the material, the mechanical, the scien- 
tific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. Human 
forces that now waver because of this division will be 



174 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

unified and reinforced. As long as ends are not thought 
of as individualized according to specific needs and 
opportunities, the mind will be content with abstrac- 
tions, and the adequate stimulus to the moral or social 
/ use of natural science and historical data will be 
lacking. But when attention is concentrated upon the 
diversified concretes, recourse to all intellectual materials 
needed to clear up the special cases will be imperative. 
At the same time that morals are made to focus in 
intelligence, things intellectual are moralized. The 
vexatious and wasteful conflict between naturalism and 
humanism is terminated. 

These general considerations may be amplified. 
First : Inquiry, discovery take the same place in morals 
that they have come to occupy in sciences of nature. 
Validation, demonstration become experimental, a mat- 
ter of consequences. Reason, always an honorific term 
in ethics, becomes actualized in the methods by which 
the needs and conditions, the obstacles and resources, 
of situations are scrutinized in detail, and intelligent 
plans of improvement are worked out. Remote and 
abstract generalities promote jumping at conclusions, 
" anticipations of nature." Bad consequences are then 
deplored as due to natural perversity and untoward 
fate. But shifting the issue to analysis of a specific 
situation makes inquiry obligatory and alert observa- 
tion of consequences imperative. No past decision nor 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 175 

old principle can ever be wholly relied upon to justify a 
course of action. No amount of pains taken in form- 
ing a purpose in a definite case is final; the conse- 
quences of its adoption must be carefully noted, and f 
purpose held only as a working hypothesis until results 
confirm its rightness. Mistakes are no longer either 
mere unavoidable accidents to be mourned or moral 
sins to be expiated and forgiven. They are lessons in 
•wrong methods of using intelligence and instructions 
as to a better course in the future. They are indica- 
tions of the need of revision, development, readjust- 
ment. Ends grow, standards of judgment are 
improved. Man is under just as much obligation to 
develop his most advanced standards and ideals as to 
use conscientiously those which he already possesses. 
Moral life is protected from falling into formalism and 
rigid repetition. It is rendered flexible, vital, growing. 

In the second place, every case where moral action is 
required becomes of equal moral importance and urgency 
with every other. If the need and deficiencies of a 
specific situation indicate improvement of health as the 
end and good, then for that situation health is the ulti- 
mate and supreme good. It is no means to some- 
thing else. It is a final and intrinsic value. The same 
thing is true of improvement of economic status, of 
making a living, of attending to business and family 
demands — all of the things which under the sanction of 



176 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

fixed ends have been rendered of secondary and merely 
instrumental value, and so relatively base and unim- 
portant. Anything that in a given situation is an end 
and good at all is o£ equal worth, rank and dignity with 
every other good of any other situation, and deserves the 
same intelligent attention. 

We note thirdly the effect in destroying the roots of 
Phariseeism. We are so accustomed to thinking of this 
as deliberate hypocrisy that we overlook its intellectual 
premises. The conception which looks for the end of 
action within the circumstances of the actual situa- 
tion will not have the same measure of judgment for all 
cases. When one factor of the situation is a person of 
trained mind and large resources, more will be expected 
than with a person of backward mind and uncultured 
experience. The absurdity of applying the same stand- 
ard of moral judgment to savage peoples that is used 

* 
with civilized will be apparent. No individual or group 

will be judged by whether they come up to or fall short 
of some fixed result, but by the direction in which they 
are moving. The bad man is the man who no matter 
how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to 
grow less good. The good man is the man who no 
matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to 
become better. Such a conception makes one severe in 
judging himself and humane in judging others. It 
excludes that arrogance which always accompanies 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 177 

judgment based on degree of approximation to fixed 
ends. 

In the fourth place, the process of growth, of im* 
provement and progress, rather than the static outcome 
and result, becomes the significant thing. Not health 
as an end fixed once and for all, but the needed im- 
provement in health- — a continual process — is the end 
and good. The end is no longer a terminus or limit to 
be reached. It is the active process of transforming 
the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal, 
but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, 
refining is the aim in living. Honesty, industry, tem- 
perance, justice, like health, wealth and learning, are 
not goods to be possessed as they would be if they ex- 
pressed fixed ends to be attained. They are directions 
of change in the quality of experience. Growth itself 
is the only moral " end." 

Although the bearing of this idea upon the problem 
of evil and the controversy between optimism and pessi- 
mism is too vast to be here discussed, it may be worth 
while to touch upon it superficially. The problem of 
evil ceases to be a theological and metaphysical one, 
and is perceived to be the practical problem of reducing, 
alleviating, as far as may be removing, the evils of life. 
Philosophy is no longer under obligation to find in- 
genious methods for proving that evils are only ap- 
parent, not real, or to elaborate schemes for explaining 



178 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

them away or, worse yet, for justifying them. It as- 
sumes another obligation : — That of contributing in 
however humble a way to methods that will assist us in 
discovering the causes of humanity's ills. Pessimism is 
a paralyzing doctrine. In declaring that the world is 
evil wholesale, it makes futile all efforts to discover the 
remediable causes of specific evils and thereby destroys 
at the root every attempt to make the world better and 
happier. Wholesale optimism, which has been the con- 
sequence of the attempt to explain evil away, is, however, 
equally an incubus. 

After all, the optimism that says that the world is 
already the best possible of all worlds might be regarded 
as the most cynical of pessimisms. If this is the best 
possible, what would a world which was fundamentally 
bad be like? Meliorism is the belief that the specific 
conditions which exist at one moment, be they com- 
paratively bad or comparatively good, in any event may 
be bettered. It encourages intelligence to study the 
positive means of good and the obstructions to their 
realization, and to put forth endeavor for the improve- 
ment of conditions. It arouses confidence and a reason- 
able hopefulness as optimism does not. For the latter 
in declaring that good is already realized in ultimate 
reality tends to make us gloss over the evils that con- 
cretely exist. It becomes too readily the creed of those 
who live at ease, in comfort, of those who have been sue- 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 179 

cessful in obtaining this world's rewards. Too readily 
optimism makes the men who hold it callous and blind 
to the sufferings of the less fortunate, or ready to find 
the cause of troubles of others in their personal vicious- 
ness. It thus co-operates with pessimism, in spite of 
the extreme nominal differences between the two, in 
benumbing sympathetic insight and intelligent effort 
in reform. It beckons men away from the world of 
relativity and change into the calm of the absolute and 
eternal. 

The import of many of these changes in moral attitude 
focusses in the idea of happiness. Happiness has often 
been made the object of the moralists' contempt. Yet 
the most ascetic moralist has usually restored the idea 
of happiness under some other name, such as bliss. 
Goodness without happiness, valor and virtue without 
satisfaction, ends without conscious enjoyment — these 
things are as intolerable practically as they are self- 
contradictory in conception. Happiness is not, however, 
a bare possession ; it is not a fixed attainment. Such 
a happiness is either the unworthy selfishness which 
moralists have so bitterly condemned, or it is, even if 
labelled bliss, an insipid tedium, a millennium of ease in 
relief from all struggle and labor. It could satisfy 
only the most delicate of molly-coddles. Happiness is 
found only in success; but success means succeeding, 
getting forward, moving in advance. It is an active 






180 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

process, not a passive outcome. Accordingly it in- 
cludes the overcoming of obstacles, the elimination of 
sources of defect and ill. Esthetic sensitiveness and 
en j o yment are a large constituent in any worthy happi- 
ness. But the esthetic appreciation which is totally 
separated from renewal of spirit, from re-creation of 
mind and purification of emotion is a weak and sickly 
thing, destined to speedy death from starvation. That 
the renewal and re-creation come unconsciously not by 
set intention but makes them the more genuine. 

Upon the whole, utilitarianism has marked the best 
in the transition from the classic theory of ends and 
goods to that which is now possible. It had definite 
merits. It insisted upon getting away from vague 
generalities, and down to the specific and concrete. It 
subordinated law to human achievement instead of sub- 
ordinating humanity to external law. It taught that 
institutions are made for man and not man for institu- 
tions; it actively promoted all issues of reform. It 
made moral good natural, humane, in touch with the 
natural goods of life. It opposed unearthly and other 
worldly morality. Above all, it acclimatized in human 
imagination the idea of social welfare as a supreme test. 
But it was still profoundly affected in fundamental 
points by old ways of thinking. It never questioned the 
idea of a fixed, final and supreme end. It only ques- 
tioned the current notions as to the nature of this 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 181 

end; and then inserted pleasure and the greatest pos- 
sible aggregate of pleasures in the position of the fixed 
end. 

Such a point of view treats concrete activities and 
specific interests not as worth while in themselves, or as 
constituents of happiness, but as mere external means to 
getting pleasures. The upholders of the old tradition 
could therefore easily accuse utilitarianism of making 
not only virtue but art, poetry, religion and the state 
into mere servile means of attaining sensuous enjoy- 
ments. Since pleasure was an outcome, a result valuable 
on its own account independently of the active processes 
that achieve it, happiness was a thing to be possessed 
and held onto. The acquisitive instincts of man were 
exaggerated at the expense of the creative. Production 
was of importance not because of the intrinsic worth of 
invention and reshaping the world, but because its 
external results feed pleasure. Like every theory that 
sets up fixed and final aims, in making the end passive 
and possessive, it made all active operations mere tools. 
Labor was an unavoidable evil to be minimized. 
Security in possession was the chief thing practically. 
Material comfort and ease were magnified in contrast 
with the pains and risk of experimental creation. 

These deficiencies, under certain conceivable condi- 
tions, might have remained merely theoretical. But the 
disposition of the times and the interests of those who 



182 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

propagated the utilitarian ideas, endowed them with 
power for social harm. In spite of the power of the 
new ideas in attacking old social abuses, there were 
elements in the teaching which operated or protected to 
sanction new social abuses. The reforming zeal was 
shown in criticism of the evils inherited from the class 
system of feudalism, evils economic, legal and political. 
But the new economic order of capitalism that was 
superseding feudalism brought its own social evils with 
it, and some of these ills utilitarianism tended to cover 
up or defend. The emphasis upon acquisition and pos- 
session of enjoyments took on an untoward color in 
connection with the contemporary enormous desire for 
wealth and the enjoyments it makes possible. 

If utilitarianism did not actively promote the new 
economic materialism, it had no means of combating it. 
Its general spirit of subordinating productive activity 
to the bare product was indirectly favorable to the 
cause of an unadorned commercialism. In spite of its 
interest in a thoroughly social aim, utilitarianism fos- 
tered a new class interest, that of the capitalistic 
property-owning interests, provided only property was 
obtained through free competition and not by govern- 
mental favor. The stress that Bentham put on se- 
curity tended to consecrate the legal institution of 
private property provided only certain legal abuses in 
connection with its acquisition and transfer were 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 183 

abolished. Beati possidentes — provided possessions had 
been obtained in accord with the rules of the competi- 
tive game — without, that is, extraneous favors from 
government. Thus utilitarianism gave intellectual con- 
firmation to all those tendencies which make " business " 
not a means of social service and an opportunity for 
personal growth in creative power but a way of accumu- 
lating the means of private enjoyments. Utilitarian 
ethics thus afford a remarkable example of the need 
of philosophic reconstruction which these lectures have 
been presenting. Up to a certain point, it reflected the 
meaning of modern thought and aspirations. But it 
was still tied down by fundamental ideas of that very 
order which it thought it had completely left behind: 
The idea of a fixed and single end lying beyond the 
diversity of human needs and acts rendered utilitarian- 
ism incapable of being an adequate representative of the 
modern spirit. It has to be reconstructed through 
emancipation from its inherited elements. 

If a few words are added upon the topic of education, 
it is only for the sake of suggesting that the educative 
process is all one with the moral process, since the latter 
is a continuous passage of experience from worse to 
better. Education has been traditionally thought of as 
preparation: as learning, acquiring certain things be- 
cause they will later be useful. The end is remote, and 
education is getting ready, is a preliminary to some- 






184 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

thing more important to happen later on. Childhood is 
only a preparation for adult life, and adult life for 
another life. Always the future, not the present, has 
been the significant thing in education: Acquisition of 
knowledge and skill for future use and enjoyment; 
formation of habits required later in life in business, 
good citizenship and pursuit of science. Education is 
thought of also as something needed by some human 
beings merely because of their dependence upon others. 
We are born ignorant, unversed, unskilled, immature, 
and consequently in a state of social dependence. In- 
struction, training, moral discipline are processes by 
which the mature, the adult, gradually raise the help- 
less to the point where they can look out for themselves. 
The business of childhood is to grow into the independ- 
ence of adulthood by means of the guidance of those 
who have already attained it. Thus the process of 
education as the main business of life ends when the 
young have arrived at emancipation from social de- 
pendence. 

These two ideas, generally assumed but rarely ex- 
plicitly reasoned out, contravene the conception that 
growing, or the continuous reconstruction of experience, 
is the only end. If at whatever period we choose to take 
a person, he is still in process of growth, then education 
is not, save as a by-product, a preparation for some- 
thing coming later. Getting from the present the degree 



MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 185 

and kind of growth there is in it is education. This 
is a constant function, independent of age. The best 
thing that can be said about any special process of 
education, like that of the formal school period, is that 
it renders its subject capable of further education: 
more sensitive to conditions of growth and more able to 
take advantage of them. Acquisition of skill, possession 
of knowledge, attainment of culture are not ends: they 
are marks of growth and means to its continuing. 

The contrast usually assumed between the period 
of education as one of social dependence and of maturity 
as one of social independence does harm. We repeat 
over and over that man is a social animal, and then con- 
fine the significance of this statement to the sphere in 
which sociality usually seems least evident, politics. 
The heart of the sociality of man is in education. The 
idea of education as preparation and of adulthood as a 
fixed limit of growth are two sides of the same obnoxious 
untruth. If the moral business of the adult as well as 
the young is a growing and developing experience, then 
the instruction that comes from social dependencies and 
interdependencies are as important for the adult as for 
the child. Moral independence for the adult means ar- 
rest of growth, isolation means induration. We exag- 
gerate the intellectual dependence of childhood so that 
children are too much kept in leading strings, and then 
we exaggerate the independence of adult life from inti- 



186 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

macy of contacts and communication with others. When 
the identity of the moral process with the processes of 
specific growth is realized, the more conscious and 
formal education of childhood will be seen to be the 
most economical and efficient means of social advance 
and reorganization, and it will also be evident that the 
test of all the institutions of adult life is their effect in 
furthering continued education. Government, business, 
art, religion, all social institutions have a meaning, a 
purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop the 
capacities of human individuals without respect to race, 
sex, class or economic status. And this is all one with 
saving that the test of their value is the extent to which 
they educate every individual into the full stature of his 
possibility. Democracy has many meanings, but if it 
has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the 
supreme test of all political institutions and industrial 
arrangements shall be the contribution they make to 
the all-around growth of every member of society. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RECONSTRUCTION AS AFFECTING 
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 

How can philosophic change seriously affect social 
philosophy? As far as fundamentals are concerned, 
every view and combination appears to have been for- 
mulated already. Society is composed of individuals: 
this obvious and basic fact no philosophy, whatever its 
pretensions to novelty, can question or alter. Hence 
these three alternatives : Society must exist for the sake 
of individuals ; or individuals must have their ends and 
ways of living 1 set for them by society ; or else society 
and individuals are correlative, organic, to one another, 
society requiring the service and subordination of indi- 
viduals and at the same time existing to serve them. 
Beyond these three views, none seems to be logically 
conceivable. Moreover, while each of the three types in- 
cludes many subspecies and variations within itself, yet 
the changes seem to have been so thoroughly rung that 
at most only minor variations are now possible. 

Especially would it seem true that the " organic " 
conception meets all the objections to the extreme indi- 
vidualistic and extreme socialistic theories, avoiding the 

187 



188 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

errors alike of Plato and Bentham. Just because so- 
ciety is composed of individuals, it would seem that indi- 
viduals and the associative relations that hold them to- 
gether must be of coequal importance. Without strong 
and competent individuals, the bonds and ties that form 
society have nothing to lay hold on. Apart from asso- 
ciations with one another, individuals are isolated from 
one another and fade and wither ; or are opposed to one 
another and their conflicts injure individual develop- 
ment. Law, state, church, family, friendship, industrial 
association, these and other institutions and arrange- 
ments are necessary in order that individuals may grow 
and find their specific capacities and functions. With- 
out their aid and support human life is, as Hobbes said, 
brutish, solitary, nasty. 

We plunge into the heart of the matter, by asserting 
that these various theories suffer from a common defect. 
They are all committed to the logic of general notions 
under which specific situations are to be brought. What 
we want light upon is this or that group of individuals, 
this or that concrete human being, this or that special 
institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of 
inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes dis- 
cussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical 
relationship to one another. The discussion goes on in 
terms of the state, the individual ; the nature of institu- 
tions as such, society in general. 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 189 

We need guidance in dealing with particular perplexi- 
ties in domestic life, and are met by dissertations on the 
Family or by assertions of the sacredness of individual 
Personality. We want to know about the worth of the 
institution of private property as it operates under 
given conditions of definite time and place. We meet 
with the reply of Proudhon that property generally is 
theft, or with that of Hegel that the realization of will 
is the end of all institutions, and that private ownership 
as the expression of mastery of personality over physi- 
cal nature is a necessary element in such realization. 
Both answers may have a certain suggestiveness in con- 
nection with specific situations. But the conceptions are 
not proffered for what they may be worth in connection 
with special historic phenomena. They are general 
answers supposed to have a universal meaning that 
covers and dominates all particulars. Hence they do 
not assist inquiry. They close it. They are not instru- 
mentalities to be employed and tested in clarifying con- 
crete social difficulties. They are ready-made principles 
to be imposed upon particulars in order to determine 
their nature. They tell us about the state when we 
want to know about some state. But the implication is 
that what is said about the state applies to any state 
that we happen to wish to know about. 

In transferring the issue from concrete situations to 
definitions and conceptual deductions, the effect, espe- 



190 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

ciallj of the organic theory, is to supply the apparatus 
for intellectual justification of the established order. 
Those most interested in practical social progress and 
the emancipation of groups from oppression have turned 
a cold shoulder to the organic theory. The effect, if not 
the intention, of German idealism as applied in social 
philosophy was to provide a bulwark for the mainte- 
nance of the political status quo against the tide of 
radical ideas coming from revolutionary France. Al- 
though Hegel asserted in explicit form that the end of 
states and institutions is to further the realization of 
the freedom of all, his effect was to consecrate the Prus- 
sian State and to enshrine bureaucratic absolutism. 
Was this apologetic tendency accidental, or did it 
spring from something in the logic of the notions that 
were employed? 

Surely the latter. If we talk about the state and the 
individual, rather than about this or that political or- 
ganization and this or that group of needy and suffering 
human beings, the tendency is to throw the glamor and 
prestige, the meaning and value attached to the general 
notion, over the concrete situation and thereby to cover 
up the defects of the latter and disguise the need of seri- 
ous reforms. The meanings which are found in the gen- 
eral notions are injected into the particulars that come 
under them. Quite properly so if we once grant the 
logic of rigid universals under which the concrete cases 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 191 

have to be subsumed in order to be understood and ex- 
plained. 

Again, the tendency of the organic point of view is 
to minimize the significance of specific conflicts. Since 
the individual and the state or social institution are but 
two sides of the same reality, since they are already rec- 
onciled in principle and conception, the conflict in any 
particular case can be but apparent. Since in theory 
the individual and the state are reciprocally necessary 
and helpful to one another, why pay much attention to 
the fact that in this state a whole group of individuals 
are suffering from oppressive conditions ? In " reality " 
their interests cannot be in conflict with those of the 
state to which they belong ; the opposition is only super- 
ficial and casual. Capital and labor cannot " really " 
conflict because each is an organic necessity to the 
other, and both to the organized community as a whole. 
There cannot " really " be any sex-problem because men 
and women are indispensable both to one another and 
to the state. In his day, Aristotle could easily employ 
the logic of general concepts superior to individuals to 
show that the institution of slavery was in the interests 
both of the state and of the slave class. Even if the in- 
tention is not to justify the existing order the effect 
is to divert attention from special situations. Rational- 
istic logic formerly made men careless in observation of 
the concrete in physical philosophy. It now operates to 



192 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

depress and retard observation in specific social phe- 
nomena. The social philosopher, dwelling in the region 
of his concepts, " solves " problems by showing the 
relationship of ideas, instead of helping men solve prob- 
lems in the concrete by supplying them hypotheses to be 
used and tested in projects of reform. 

Meanwhile, of course, the concrete troubles and evils 
remain. They are not magically waived out of existence 
because in theory society is organic. The region of 
concrete difficulties, where the assistance of intelligent 
method for tentative plans for experimentation is ur- 
gently needed, is precisely where intelligence fails to 
operate. In this region of the specific and concrete, men 
are thrown back upon the crudest empiricism, upon 
short-sighted opportunism and the matching of brute 
forces. In theory, the particulars are all neatly dis- 
posed of; they come under their appropriate heading 
and category ; they are labelled and go into an orderly 
pigeon-hole in a systematic filing cabinet, labelled politi- 
cal science or sociology. But in empirical fact they 
remain as perplexing, confused and unorganized as they 
were before. So they are dealt with not by even an 
endeavor at scientific method but by blind rule of 
thumb, citation of precedents, considerations of imme- 
diate advantage, smoothing things over, use of coercive 
force and the clash of personal ambitions. The world 
still survives ; it has therefore got on somehow : — so 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 193 

much cannot be denied. The method of trial and error 
and competition of selfishnesses has somehow wrought 
out many improvements. But social theory neverthe- 
less exists as an idle luxury rather than as a guiding 
method of inquiry and planning. In the question of 
methods concerned with reconstruction of special situa- 
tions rather than in any refinements in the general con- 
cepts of institution, individuality, state, freedom, law, 
order, progress, etc., lies the true impact of philosophi- 
cal reconstruction. 

Consider the conception of the individual self. The 
individualistic school of England and France in the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was empirical in in- 
tent. It based its individualism, philosophically speak- 
ing, upon the belief that individuals are alone real, that 
classes and organizations are secondary and derived. 
They are artificial, while individuals are natural. In 
what way then can individualism be said to come under 
the animadversions that have been passed? To say the 
defect was that this school overlooked those connections 
with other persons which are a part of the constitution 
of every individual is true as far as it goes ; but unfortu- 
nately it rarely goes beyond the point of just that 
wholesale justification of institutions which has been 
criticized. 

The real difficulty is that the individual is regarded 
as something given, something already there. Conse- 



194 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

quently, he can only be something to be catered to, some- 
thing whose pleasures are to be magnified and posses- 
sions multiplied. When the individual is taken as some- 
thing given already, anything that can be done to him 
or for him it can only be by way of external impres- 
sions and belongings: sensations of pleasure and pain, 
comforts, securities. Now it is true that social arrange- 
ments, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than 
that man is made for them; that they are means and 
agencies of human welfare and progress. But they are 
not means for obtaining something for individuals, not 
even happiness. They are means of creating indi- 
viduals. Only in the physical sense of physical bodies 
that to the senses are separate is individuality an 
original datum. Individuality in a social and moral 
sense is something to be wrought out. It means initia- 
tive, inventiveness, varied resourcefulness, assumption 
of responsibility in choice of belief and conduct. These 
are not gifts, but achievements. As achievements, they 
are not absolute but relative to the use that is to be 
made of them. And this use varies with the environ- 
ment. 

The import of this conception comes out in consider- 
ing the fortunes of the idea of self-interest. All mem- 
bers of the empirical school emphasized this idea. It 
was the sole motive of mankind. Virtue was to be at- 
tained by making benevolent action profitable to the 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 195 

individual; social arrangements were to be reformed so 
that egoism and altruistic consideration of others would 
be identified. Moralists of the opposite school were not 
backward in pointing out the evils of any theory that 
reduced both morals and political science to means of 
calculating self-interest. Consequently they threw the 
whole idea of interest overboard as obnoxious to morals. 
The effect of this reaction was to strengthen the cause 
of authority and political obscurantism. When the 
play of interest is eliminated, what remains? Wihat 
concrete moving forces can be found? Those who iden- 
tified the self with something ready-made and its in- 
terest with acquisition of pleasure and profit took the 
most effective means possible to reinstate the logic of 
abstract conceptions of law, justice, sovereignty, free- 
dom, etc. — all of those vague general ideas that for all 
their seeming rigidity can be manipulated by any clever 
politician to cover up his designs and to make the worse 
seem the better cause. Interests are specific and dy- 
namic ; they are the natural terms of any concrete social 
thinking. But they are damned beyond recovery when 
they are identified with the things of a petty selfishness. 
They can be employed as vital terms only when the 
self is seen to be in process, and interest to be a 
name for whatever is concerned in furthering its move- 
ment. 

The same logic applies to the old dispute of whether 



196 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

reform should start with the individual or with institu- 
tions. When the self is regarded as something complete 
within itself, then it is readily argued that only internal 
moralistic changes are of importance in general reform. 
Institutional changes are said to be merely external. 
They may add conveniences and comforts to life, but 
they cannot effect moral improvements. The result is 
to throw the burden for social improvement upon free- 
will in its most impossible form. Moreover, social and 
economic passivity are encouraged. Individuals are lecT 
to concentrate in moral introspection upon their own 
vices and virtues, and to neglect the character of the 
environment. Morals withdraw from active concern 
with detailed economic and political conditions. Let us 
perfect ourselves within, and in due season changes in 
society will come of themselves is the teaching. And 
while saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners 
run the world. But when self-hood is perceived to be an 
active process it is also seen that social modifications are 
the only means of the creation of changed personalities. 
Institutions are viewed in their educative effect : — with 
reference to the types of individuals they foster. The in- 
terest in individual moral improvement and the social 
interest in objective reform of economic and political 
conditions are identified. And inquiry into the meaning 
of social arrangements gets definite point and direction. 
We are led to ask what the specific stimulating, foster- 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 197 

ing and nurturing power of each specific social arrange- 
ment may be. The old-time separation between politics 
and morals is abolished at its root. 

Consequently we cannot be satisfied with the general 
statement that society and the state is organic to the 
individual. The question is one of specific causations. 
Just what response does this social arrangement, po- 
litical or economic, evoke, and what effect does it 
have upon the disposition of those who engage in it? 
Does it release capacity? If so, how widely? Among 
a few, with a corresponding depression in others, or in 
an extensive and equitable way? Is the capacity which 
is set free also directed in some coherent way, so that 
it becomes a power, or its manifestation spasmodic and 
capricious? Since responses are of an indefinite di- 
versity of kind, these inquiries have to be detailed and 
specific. Are men's senses rendered more delicately sen- 
sitive and appreciative, or are they blunted and dulled 
by this and that form of social organization? Are their 
minds trained so that the hands are more deft and cun- 
ning? Is curiosity awakened or blunted? What is its 
quality : is it merely esthetic, dwelling on the forms and 
surfaces of things or is it also an intellectual search- 
ing into their meaning? Such questions as these (as 
well as the more obvious ones about the qualities con- 
ventionally labelled moral), become the starting-points 
of inquiries about every institution of the community 



198 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

when it is recognized that individuality is not originally 
given but is created under the influences of associated 
life. Like utilitarianism, the theory subjects every form 
of organization to continual scrutiny and criticism. 
But instead of leading us to ask what it does in the way 
of causing pains and pleasures to individuals already 
in existence, it inquires what is done to release specific 
capacities and co-ordinate them into working powers. 
What sort of individuals are created? 

The waste of mental energy due to conducting discus- 
sion of social affairs in terms of conceptual generalities 
is astonishing. How far would the biologist and the 
physician progress if when the subject of respiration is 
under consideration, discussion confined itself to bandy- 
ing back and forth the concepts of organ and organism : 
— If for example one school thought respiration could 
be known and understood by insisting upon the fact that 
it occurs in an individual body and therefore is an 
" individual " phenomenon, while an opposite school in- 
sisted that it is simply one function in organic inter- 
action with others and can be known or understood 
therefore only by reference to other functions taken in 
an equally general or wholesale way? Each proposition 
is equally true and equally futile. What is needed is 
specific inquiries into a multitude of specific struc- 
tures and interactions. Not only does the solemn 
reiteration of categories of individual and organic or 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 199 

social whole not further these definite and detailed in- 
quiries, but it checks them. It detains thought within 
pompous and sonorous generalities wherein controversy 
is as inevitable as it is incapable of solution. It is true 
enough that if cells were not in vital interaction with 
one another, they could neither conflict nor co-operate. 
But the fact of the existence of an " organic " social 
group* instead of answering any questions merely marks 
the fact that questions exist: Just what conflicts and 
what co-operations occur, and what are their specific 
causes and consequences? But because of the persist- 
ence within social philosophy of the order of ideas that 
has been expelled from natural philosophy, even sociolo- 
gists take conflict or co-operation as general categories 
upon which to base their science, and condescend to em- 
pirical facts only for illustrations. As a rule, their 
chief " problem " is a purely dialectical one, covered up 
by a thick quilt of empirical anthropological and his- 
torical citations: How do individuals unite to form so- 
ciety? How are individuals socially controlled? And 
the problem is justly called dialectical because it springs 
from antecedent conceptions of " individual " and 
"social." 

Just as " individual " is not one thing, but is a 
blanket term for the immense variety of specific re- 
actions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature 
that are evoked, and confirmed under the influences of 



200 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

associated life, so with the term " social." Society is 
one word, but infinitely many things. It covers all the 
ways in which by associating together men share their 
experiences, and build up common interests and aims ; 
street gangs, schools for burglary, clans, social cliques, 
trades unions, joint stock corporations, villages and 
international alliances. The new method takes effect in 
substituting inquiry into these specific, changing and 
relative facts (relative to problems and purposes, not 
metaphysically relative) for solemn manipulation of 
general notions. 

Strangely enough, the current conception of the state 
is a case in point. For one direct influence of the 
classic order of fixed species arranged in hierarchical 
order is the attempt of German political philosophy in 
the nineteenth century to enumerate a definite number 
of institutions, each having its own essential and im- 
mutable meaning ; to arrange them in an order of " evo- 
lution " which corresponds with the dignity and rank 
of the respective meanings. The National State was 
placed at the top as the consummation and culmination, 
and also the basis of all other institutions. 

Hegel is a striking example of this industry, but he is 
far from the only one. Many who have bitterly quar- 
relled with him, have only differed as to the details of 
the " evolution " or as to the particular meaning to be 
attributed as essential Begriff to some one of the 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 201 

enumerated institutions. The quarrel has been bitter 
only because the underlying premises were the same. 
Particularly have many schools of thought, varying 
even more widely in respect to method and conclusion, 
agreed upon the final consummating position of the 
state. They may not go as far as Hegel in making the 
sole meaning of history to be the evolution of National 
Territorial States, each of which embodies more than 
the prior form of the essential meaning or conception of 
the State and consequently displaces it, until we arrive 
at that triumph of historical evolution, the Prussian 
State. But they do not question the unique and su- 
preme position of the State in the social hierarchy. 
Indeed that conception has hardened into unquestion- 
able dogma under the title of sovereignty. 

There can be no doubt of the tremendously important 
role played by the modern territorial national state. 
The formation of these states has been the centre of 
modern political history. France, Great Britain, Spain 
were the first peoples to attain nationalistic organiza- 
tion, but in the nineteenth century their example was fol- 
lowed by Japan, Germany and Italy, to say nothing of 
a large number of smaller states, Greece, Servia, Bul- 
garia, etc. As everybody knows, one of the most im- 
portant phases of the recent world war was the struggle 
to complete the nationalistic movement, resulting in the 
erection of Bohemia, Poland, etc., into independent 



202 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

states, and the accession of Armenia, Palestine, etc., to 
the rank of candidates. 

The struggle for the supremacy of the State over 
other forms of organization was directed against the 
power of minor districts, provinces, principalities, 
against the dispersion of power among feudal lords as 
well as, in some countries, against the pretensions of an 
ecclesiastic potentate. The " State " represents the 
conspicuous culmination of the great movement of social 
integration and consolidation taking place in the last 
few centuries, tremendously accelerated by the concen- 
trating and combining forces of steam ad electricity. 
Naturally, inevitably, the students of political science 
have been preoccupied with this great historic phe- 
nomenon, and their intellectual activities have been di- 
rected to its systematic formulation. Because the con- 
temporary progressive movement was to establish the 
unified state against the inertia of minor social units 
and against the ambitions of rivals for power, political 
theory developed the dogma of the sovereignty of the 
national state, internally and externally. 

As the work of integration and consolidation reaches 
its climax, the question arises, however, whether the na- 
tional state, once it is firmly established and no longer 
struggling against strong foes, is not just an instru- 
mentality for promoting and protecting other and more 
voluntary forms of association, rather than a supreme 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 203 

end in itself. Two actual phenomena may be pointed to 
in support of an affirmative answer. Along with the 
development of the larger, more inclusive and more uni- 
fied organization of the state has gone the emancipation 
of individuals from restrictions and servitudes previ- 
ously imposed by custom and class status. But the in- 
dividuals freed from external and coercive bonds have not 
remained isolated. Social molecules have at once recom- 
bined in new associations and organizations. Compul- 
sory associations have been replaced by voluntary ones ; 
rigid organizations by those more amenable to human 
choice and purposes — more directly changeable at will. 
What upon one side looks like a movement toward in- 
dividualism, turns out to be really a movement toward 
multiplying all kinds and varieties of associations : 
Political parties, industrial corporations, scientific and 
artistic organizations, trade unions, churches, schools, 
clubs and societies without number, for the cultivation of 
every conceivable interest that men have in common. As 
they develop in number and importance, the state tends 
to become more and more a regulator and adjuster 
among them; defining the limits of their actions, pre- 
venting and settling conflicts. 

Its " supremacy " approximates that of the con- 
ductor of an orchestra, who makes no music himself but 
who harmonizes the activities of those who in producing 
it are doing the thing intrinsically worth while. The 



204 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

state remains highly important — but its importance 
consists more and more in its power to foster and co- 
ordinate the activities of voluntary groupings. Only 
nominally is it in any modern community the end for the 
sake of which all the other societies and organizations 
exist. Groupings for promoting the diversity of goods 
that men share have become the real social units. They 
occupy the place which traditional theory has claimed 
either for mere isolated individuals or for the supreme 
and single political organization. Pluralism is well 
ordained in present political practice and demands a 
modification of hierarchical and monistic theory. Every 
combination of human forces that adds its own con- 
tribution of value to life has for that reason its own 
unique and ultimate worth. It cannot be degraded 
into a means to glorify the State. One reason for the 
increased demoralization of war is that it forces the 
State into an abnormally supreme position. 

The other concrete fact is the opposition between the 
claim of independent sovereignty in behalf of the terri- 
torial national state and the growth of international 
and what have well been called trans-national interests. 
The weal and woe of any modern state is bound up with 
that of others. Weakness, disorder, false principles on 
the part of any state are not confined within its boun- 
daries. They spread and infect other states. The same 
is true of economic, artistic and scientific advances. 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 205 

Moreover the voluntary associations just spoken of do 
not coincide with political boundaries. Associations of 
mathematicians, chemists, astronomers; business corpo- 
rations, labor organizations, churches are trans-national 
because the interests they represent are worldwide. In 
such ways as these, internationalism is not an aspiration 
but a fact, not a sentimental ideal but a force. Yet 
these interests are cut across and thrown out of gear by 
the traditional doctrine of exclusive national sover- 
eignty. It is the vogue of this doctrine, or dogma, 
that presents the strongest barrier to the effective for- 
mation of an international mind which alone agrees 
with the moving forces of present-day labor, commerce, 
science, art and religion. 

Society, as was said, is many associations not a single 
organization. Society means association; coming to- 
gether in joint intercourse and action for the better 
realization of any form of experience which is aug- 
mented and confirmed by being shared. Hence there 
are as many associations as there are goods which are 
enhanced by being mutually communicated and partici- 
pated in. And these are literally indefinite in number. 
Indeed, capacity to endure publicity and communication 
is the test by which it is decided whether a pretended 
good is genuine or spurious. Moralists have always in- 
sisted upon the fact that good is universal, objective, not 
just private, particular. But too often, like Plato, 



206 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

they have been content with a metaphysical universality 
or, like Kant, with a logical universality. Communi- 
cation, sharing, joint participation are the only actual 
ways of universalizing the moral law and end. We in- 
sisted at the last hour upon the unique character of 
every intrinsic good. But the counterpart of this 
proposition is that the situation in which a good is 
consciously realized is not one of transient sensations 
or private appetites but one of sharing and communi- 
cation — public, social. Even the hermit communes with 
gods or spirits ; even misery loves company ; and the 
most extreme selfishness includes a band of followers 
or some partner to share in the attained good. 
Universalization means socialization, the extension of 
the area and range of those who share in a 
good. 

The increasing acknowledgment that goods exist and 
endure only through being communicated and that asso- 
ciation is the means of conjoint sharing lies back of the 
modern sense of humanity and democracy. It is the 
saving salt in altruism and philanthropy, which with- 
out this factor degenerate into moral condescension and 
moral interference, taking the form of trying to regu- 
late the affairs of others under the guise of doing them 
good or of conferring upon them some right as if it 
were a gift of charity. It follows that organization is 
never an end in itself. It is a means of promoting asso^ 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 207 

elation, of multiplying effective points of contact be- 
tween persons, directing their intercourse into the modes 
of greatest f ruitfulness. 

The tendency to treat organization as an end in itself 
is responsible for all the exaggerated theories in which 
individuals are subordinated to some institution to 
which is given the noble name of society. Society is the 
process of associating in such ways that experiences, 
ideas, emotions, values are transmitted and made 
common. To this active process, both the individual 
and the institutionally organized may truly be said to 
be subordinate. The individual is subordinate because 
except in and through communication of experience 
from and to others, he remains dumb, merely sentient, 
a brute animal. Only in association with fellows does 
he become a conscious centre of experience. Organiza- 
tion, which is what traditional theory has generally 
meant by the term Society or State, is also subordinate 
because it becomes static, rigid, institutionalized when- 
ever it is not employed to facilitate and enrich the con- 
tacts of human beings with one another. 

The long-time controversy between rights and duties, 
law and freedom is another version of the strife between 
the Individual and Society as fixed concepts. Freedom 
for an individual means growth, ready change when 
modification is required. 

Jt signifies an active process, that of release of 



208 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

capacity from whatever hems it in. But since society 
can develop only as new resources are put at its dis- 
posal, it is absurd to suppose that freedom has positive 
significance for individuality but negative meaning for 
social interests. Society is strong, forceful, stable 
against accident only when all its members can function 
to the limit of their capacity. Such functioning cannot 
be achieved without allowing a leeway of experimenta- 
tion beyond the limits of established and sanctioned 
custom. A certain amount of overt confusion and ir- 
regularity is likely to accompany the granting of the 
margin of liberty without which capacity cannot find 
itself. But socially as well as scientifically the great 
thing is not to avoid mistakes but to have them take 
place under conditions such that they can be utilized to 
increase intelligence in the future. 

If British liberal social philosophy tended, true to the 
spirit of its atomistic empiricism, to make freedom and 
the exercise of rights ends in themselves, the remedy is 
not to be found in recourse to a philosophy of fixed 
obligations and authoritative law such as characterized 
German political thinking. The latter, as events have 
demonstrated; is dangerous because of its implicit 
menace to the free self-determination of other social 
groups. But it is also weak internally when put to the 
final test. In its hostility to the free experimentation 
and power of choice of the individual in determining 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 209 

social affairs, it limits the capacity of many or most 
individuals to share effectively in social operations, and 
thereby deprives society of the full contribution of all 
its members. The best guarantee of collective efficiency 
and power is liberation and use of the diversity of indi- 
vidual capacities in initiative, planning, foresight, 
vigor and endurance. Personality must be educated, 
and personality cannot be educated by confining its 
operations to technical and specialized things, or to the 
less important relationships of life. Full education 
comes only when there is a responsible share on the part 
of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping 
the aims and policies of the social groups to which he 
belongs. This fact fixes the significance of democracy. 
It cannot be conceived as a sectarian or racial thing nor 
as a consecration of some form of government which 
has already attained constitutional sanction. It is but 
a name for the fact that human nature is developed only 
when its elements take part in directing things which 
are common, things for tne sake of which men and 
women form groups — families, industrial companies, 
governments, churches, scientific associations and so on. 
The principle holds as much of one form of association, 
say in industry and commerce, as it does in government. 
The identification of democracy with political democ- 
racy which is responsible for most of its failures is, how- 
ever, based upon the traditional ideas which make the 



210 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

individual and the state ready-made entities in them- 
selves. 

As the new ideas find adequate expression in social 
life, they will be absorbed into a moral background, and 
will the ideas and beliefs themselves be deepened and 
be unconsciously transmitted and sustained. They will 
color the imagination and temper the desires and af- 
fections. They will not form a set of ideas to be ex- 
pounded, reasoned out and argumentatively supported, 
but will be a spontaneous way of envisaging life. Then 
they will take on religious value. The religious spirit 
will be revivified because it will be in harmony with men's 
unquestioned scientific beliefs and their ordinary day- 
by-day social activities. It will not be obliged to lead a 
timid, half-concealed and half-apologetic life because 
tied to scientific ideas and social creeds that are con- 
x tinuously eaten into and broken down. But especially 
will the ideas and beliefs themselves be deepened and 
intensified because spontaneously fed by emotion and 
translated into imaginative vision and fine art, while 
they are now maintained by more or less conscious ef- 
fort, by deliberate reflection, by taking thought. They 
are technical and abstract just because they are not as 
yet carried as matter of course by imagination and 
feelings. 

We began by pointing out that European philosophy 
arose when intellectual methods and scientific results 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 211 

moved away from social traditions which had consoli- 
dated and embodied the fruits of spontaneous desire and 
fancy. It was pointed out that philosophy had ever 
since had the problem of adjusting the dry, thin and 
meagre scientific standpoint with the obstinately per- 
sisting body of warm and abounding imaginative beliefs. 
Conceptions of possibility, progress, free movement and 
infinitely diversified opportunity have been suggested by 
modern science. But until they have displaced from 
imagination the heritage of the immutable and the once- 
for-all ordered and systematized, the ideas of mech- 
anism and matter will lie like a dead weight upon the 
emotions, paralyzing religion and distorting art. When 
the liberation of capacity no longer seems a menace to 
organization and established institutions, something 
that cannot be avoided practically and yet something 
that is a threat to conservation of the most precious 
values of the past, when the liberating of human capacity 
operates as a socially creative force, art will not be a 
luxury, a stranger to the daily occupations of making 
a living. Making a living economically speaking, will 
be at one with making a life that is worth living. And 
when the emotional force, the mystic force one might 
say, of communication, of the miracle of shared life 
and shared experience is spontaneously felt, the hard- 
ness and crudeness of contemporary life will be bathed 
in the light that never was on land or sea. 



212 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY 

Poetry, art, religion are precious things. They can- 
not be maintained by lingering in the past and futilely 
wishing to restore what the movement of events in 
science, industry and politics has destroyed. They are 
an out-flowering of thought and desires that uncon- 
sciously converge into a disposition of imagination as a 
result of thousands and thousands of daily episodes and 
contact. They cannot be willed into existence or 
coerced into being. The wind of the spirit bloweth 
where it listeth and the kingdom of God in such things 
does not come with observation. But while it is im- 
possible to retain and recover by deliberate volition old 
sources of religion and art that have been discredited, it 
is possible to expedite the development of the vital 
sources of a religion and art that are yet to be. Not 
indeed by action directly aimed at their production, but 
by substituting faith in the active tendencies of the day 
for dread and dislike of them, and by the courage of 
intelligence to follow whither social and scientific 
changes direct us. We are weak today in ideal matters 
because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The 
bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the 
daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper 
thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philoso- 
phy shall have co-operated with the course of events and 
made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, 
science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 213 

imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling 
will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this 
articulation and revelation of the meanings of the cur- 
rent course of events is the task and problem of philoso- 
phy in days of transition. 



